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Post by meeno8 on May 31, 2022 14:00:34 GMT -6
It has been eerily silent here in the wake of the most recent posts on this thread. I am not sure what that indicates, but maybe it means some who used to post actively have abandoned they symposium.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 1, 2022 11:37:19 GMT -6
Here is a link to an article on the pseudo-scientist Rupert Sheldrake. You can see it here.Perhaps our local pseudo-scientist, Meeno8, will find a kindred spirit in Rupert. I don't mind at all if Meeno8 touts his "qualifications" here and admit, on the basis of my long acquaintance with him and his family, that some of them are even true, but when he claims he is a scientist, I have to object. I find it odd that he wants to claim this. He and science have had a contentious relationship. He regards astrology as a science, for instance, and bangs on about mysticism, another pseudo-scientific topic. Also, he talks more about himself than he does about Sri Krsna. No one else here talks about himself in such terms and at such lengths. I never mention my academic qualifications or how much I make or whether or not I am a member of MENSA (not). All that is superfluous, unnecessary dribble. And his little "discuss among yourselves" are rather laughable. As if the questions he raises are just so fascinating. The point of this forum is to discuss Sri Krsna, Sri Radhika, and Sri Caitanya and the tradition out of which they developed and which they inspired after their fullest development. My special interest is in modernizing the CV tradition. Others will naturally have other interests. If Meeno8 wants to talk about Meeno8, that is fine, I suppose, though it is somewhat off topic in my view. Perhaps it goes to the category of modern bhaktas and their states of mind and finance. Anyway, he's my gurubhai and I gotta love him. Same for the other oddball in my tradition, Jagadish.
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Post by Nityānanda dāsa on Jun 1, 2022 11:43:59 GMT -6
OK. Then maybe just edit your posts instead of making apologies. I think apologies are fantastic. They set a wonderful example of how we can all improve our communication with one another. It also shows some humility, which is a quality that we're all aspiring to improve. So my two cents is 'apologize away' (if it is warranted)! It certainly increases my respect to see respected wise men acting in that way, rather than the opposite.
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 1, 2022 18:19:40 GMT -6
If people do not reveal information about themselves, how can we get to know each other here? Or should we not be getting to know each other better? That seems like the insidious nature of some kind of weird cult to me, at any rate.
For the record, Dr. Neal Delmonico. I have already clearly stated that I DO NOT consider astrology to be a science. I studied Astronomy in college, NOT astrology. When one of the students in the class asked about astrology, the Astronomy professor pointed out that it is just a pseudo-science. On the other hand, you may just be cajoling me for fun instead of seriously making that accusation. I really could care less, but I think you already know that.
Whoever implied that mysticism is science? It was not I.
One of my clients from the late '80s at a company where I did a software project rating bond funds (and Nitaidas did meet him once - a Gujarati Jain married to a Brahmin woman) once introduced me to someone as a 'good computer scientist'. Prior to that I had never thought of myself in those terms. Then when I was working with a Russian software engineer on a project, he remarked, "We are computer scientists, so we are always doing experiments." What he meant was that different approaches to writing code have potentially different levels of performance, which need to be benchmarked by actually running the code. One of my friends who is a software developer and professional musician that plays string bass in a local orchestra (and he teaches classes in Unity, a gaming platform, at Columbia College) thinks that calling programmers by other names like developers or software engineers is just plain silly. When it comes down to it, it is just a matter of semantics. Computer scientist? My brother-in-law that was at a software company and worked his way up from writing operating systems to director, then took his pension and went out to buy a business after putting in his 15 years, once stated at a family gathering that there are only a few real programmers in the world. I think I know what he means by that, although I personally think the number is higher than that.
Here is an anecdote not about me personally, rather about that same brother-in-law's cousin, who heads the team at CERN that discovered the Higgs-Boson. He stated in an interview just after that breakthrough that it proved something theorized centuries ago. Maybe he had something written in the Upanishads in mind, or perhaps something the ancient Greek philosophers were thinking. I asked my brother-in-law to find out about that, but he never got back to me.
I really have nothing to offer here about any special knowledge of CV beyond what is already being presented. I will check in and read posts here from time to time, but it's highly unlikely that I will post anything else myself, since the founder of this site does not seem to welcome any posts by me anymore. If someone wants to discuss something, they can message me here rather than addressing me on a thread. Se la vie and all that jazz...
My day job may be a 'pseudo-scientist' as Nitai puts it, but my actual major in college was music composition, and performing was my very first career, although that did not work out to be something I could succeed at well enough to make an actual living (another story for anyone who is interested, and they can message me in that case). There is little time in my life to compose, but occasionally I do write using a software package. In college I wrote on paper with the lines above and below middle C. There I go again, explaining myself and my life to an audience that really likely has no interest in it. I am 'taking my marbles and going on my merry way now'. Best wishes to you all in achieving prem. I have just basically wasted a block of time writing this, which I'll never get back. Who is reading it? No way to tell, since most of the people according to the stats on any given day are guests and not members of the forum
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 1, 2022 20:28:55 GMT -6
So now you deny ever trying to use astrology to play the markets? I remember a time when that consumed you and, of course, how it never worked. You and your dad, always trying to develop a system to beat the markets or the odds in Las Vegas. You even managed to rope in some foolish investors whose money, along with some of your own, you promptly lost. Astrology ki Jaya! You used to be quite a believer in astrology, even did charts for people. So all of this you now deny?
Anyway, I don't want to make fun of you. I am just a little disappointed in you. I though you were my one sane gurubhai. Perhaps we are all insane. It is no longer possible be like Baba and the others that we knew then. We are on our own and have to find our own way.
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 2, 2022 8:56:36 GMT -6
Well, now I am prompted to respond to your ridiculous allegations once again. Maybe you even believe those lies, or your memory is seriously compromised in your early 70s. Is this you poking fun just for the fun of it, or are you really alleging this crap? Does not matter at the end of the day. It could just boil down to incorrect assumptions on your part.
My father showed me his little system using moving averages for oats futures contracts when there was a drought and volatility picked up in the grain markets in the summer of '83. With that I quadrupled the $3,000 I put into a margin account in a little over 2 months without a single losing trade. Evidence? I still have my margin account statements on file to attest to that fact, if anyone should want evidence. Then the drought was over by the fall, and no more buy/sell signals to trade with. If I had a lot more money to start with, that could have made all the difference. The general consensus is that people that are more successful in trading futures for themselves have at least a minimum of 50K to 100k to play with.
My father was definitely consumed with coming up with systems for Las Vegas games like roulette in his later years, but when the book Beat the Dealer first came out in the '60s, he went out to Vegas casinos on junkets (all paid for) and counted cards at the blackjack tables, and he made lots of money on each trip. He would come back and be passing out Benjamins ($100 bills). That lasted a few years until all the casinos caught on that they were bleeding cash from all the card counters that had read that book, then they all put several decks in the shoe making it virtually impossible to continue to count cards.
Jyotish? That was always just a form of entertainment. I already stated here that I have a text in Sanskrit about timing gold prices and it clearly states that whenever Surya (the sun) enters Singha (Leo), those prices are supposed to rise. That is not a fact, if anyone takes the trouble to look at historical data of gold prices with respect to that transit.
Again, I have always understood the difference between astronomy and astrology. I had my chart done by a friend of a friend (Western astrology) way back in high school, and based on that I could see that it may be entertaining, but completely useless otherwise. Unlike that misguided student in Astronomy 101 at University of Denver, I would have never asked the professor a question about astrology. It is IGM that asserts officially that jyotish is a real science, just that today the full knowledge to use it has been lost. And where did that idea come from, without naming anyone in particular?
Who historically has used astrology for trading? Some traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Group back in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. How do I know this? Because a guy that clerked for one of the traders told me so. At CBOT as well? Probably. Your buddy Steve could tell you about that. Did it work very well for them? I have no idea. Now those futures pits are all under one roof in the original CBOT building, and only a handful of traders and brokers remain on the floor these days, where there used to be thousands of them, especially in that huge 30 Year Bonds pit in the 1980s.
Investors I had that I lost money for? Where do you get that idea? I never had a single 'investor' for any of my businesses, including IT consulting, general contracting in construction, real estate, futures brokerage. If I had an investor for futures brokerage at any point in the past, I would have opened my own firm and hired my own account executives and rake in money in full service commissions. That Gujarati fellow (Shah) I mentioned had a client who was literally an adrenaline junkie. Shah set it up so I would call in trades to Shah's administrative assistant to place in that client's account. They were all steadily making money in the guy's margin account, but that adrenaline junkie did not think there were enough trades in any given month. His conception about futures trading was that it should be like it is for successful floor traders that had the direct access to the pits, rather than those of us that were not one the floor.
Look at what just happened in the crypto currency market with over a trillion dollars lost by 'investors'. A lot of people just don't get the basic principle: Do not put any more money into any speculative market that you can't afford to lose. What has always kept me from trading in my margin account instead of working in software development? A lack of risk capital. Plus being under-capitalized from a business standpoint. That is the root cause of a lot of business failures irrespective of the line of business. What is the deal here now? Have we just become mud-slinging politicians trying to appeal to a base? OK. If that is the name of the game, then who is winning? Who is keeping score? Nityananda Das? Your thoughts? (I know, you are probably thinking to yourself 'why drag me into this?', but any game needs a referee and a score keeper, does it not?).
I return to my argument re mathematics. How can we wrap our minds around irrational numbers like the square root of pi? We do have rational and irrational sides to us, which is perhaps how we can categorize some numbers as irrational. Pi itself never resolves no matter how many decimal places someone calculates it out to, but it is a real ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle. What is a circle in reality other than a mental construct? Do they really exist in objective reality? Yet, without a circular shape, we could not have that marvelous technology of the wheel. Now I suppose Dr. Delmonico will accuse me of trying to reinvent that next. Ha ha! Later, alligators. In a while crocodiles.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 2, 2022 10:22:21 GMT -6
In my morning meditations I realized something important about myself. This was that I unfortunately often miss opportunities to show compassion to others who are suffering and with whom I am connected in some way. The most recent example of this is in my exchanges with my gurubhai, Minaketan Ram das, aka Meeno8. Instead of responding to him compassionately as we should when responding to our fellow co-religionists, I became critical of him, uncaring for the suffering he is going through and has been through for much of his life about which I know a considerable amount. In other words, I became like that monster Krsna that the Jiva Institute has been promoting. I cared little for his suffering and simply piled on more. That was terribly unkind of me and indicates to me that I am still laboring away on the stage of anartha-nivrtti, nowhere near the niSThA that I hoped I might be approaching. Well, it is good to be schooled by Krsna or Mahaprabhu through Mina or anyone else for that matter. It introduces me to my own arrogance which I periodically lose sight of. Here I have made jokes about how Swamis need to be called Shithead instead of Maharaja and forget that I too need reminding of my own arrogance and blindness to the sufferings of others. The lesson has been learned and may even be remembered for a while, but I have no doubt that I will get schooled again and again, through the medium of others, by that consciousness being present (trapped?) in my noxious mind. The guru speaks to one in mysterious and unexpected ways. One has to be extremely vigilant in order to get the message.
As for the monster Krsna, the uncaring one, it occurred to me that a suitable response has already been supplied by Sri Rupa in his Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu. At 1.2.59 Sri Rupa says:
Although from the point of Siddhanta the essential natures of the Lord of Sri [Visnu] and of Krsna are not different, from the perspective of rasa, Krsna's form is superior. This is the law of rasa.
So let's call the uncaring Krsna Visnu and look beyond him and his opulent indifference to the svarupa of Krsna who, though non-different, is superior and the real object of our love and devotion and who indeed loves us in return. He is the reservoir of rasa, not Visnu. He is the one who incarnates repeatedly to relieve the sufferings of the jivas and who reciprocates our feeble attempts to approach and love him with far more than he gets.
Thanks to Mina for being Sri Krsna's tool, though I don't think he had a choice. Finally, don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain!
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bets
New Member
Posts: 27
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Post by bets on Jun 2, 2022 10:46:12 GMT -6
But I WANT those ruby slippers!
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 2, 2022 11:18:46 GMT -6
There was a great album from the late 60's using Moog synthesizer: The Wozard of Iz.
Suffering? Not much right now. I have my pulse massager and hot and cold packs for the pinched nerve in the shoulder. Sure we are aging and have more aches and pains than we did as teenagers, but even in my youth I could get sore from playing sports and lifting weights while the muscles healed.
Things do keep getting off topic here, admittedly. That is a natural tendency with we humans and our built in defects. Even the best written software platforms have some bugs in there somewhere, never reaching that elusive ideal of zero defects. Don't even get me started on security vis a vis the internet.
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 2, 2022 12:00:54 GMT -6
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 2, 2022 16:05:52 GMT -6
Perhaps it is Nitaidas Mahashoy that needs compassion, since he appears to have begun a descent into some vortex of a nihilist void, which he firmly believes will be awaiting him at death. Kind of like the event horizon of a black hole, I suppose.
He speaks of science and matter, while glossing over all of the other phenomena in the known universe, like energy, dark matter, dark energy, magnetic fields, gamma rays, x-rays, light as both a wave and composed of photons as particles. There are paradoxes in quantum theory. That strikes me as kind of mystical, as in mysterious and acintya. No, not that new age pseudo-scientific crap, and he already provided a link for that here.
We could debate this subject ad nauseum, but I think we all have better things to do with our time.
I think Dr. Delmonico and I had best agree to disagree. And why should we have to be in agreement on everything anyways?
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 3, 2022 11:16:13 GMT -6
Some may find this somewhat interesting, and from all appearances these indicators do look like they could be quite viable: www.wave59.com/About/GeniusFeatures/MarketAstrophysics.aspxRe: Arrogance and humility - 2 sides of the same coin and just a bunch of bunk IMO. Certainly being a Narcissist or having an inferiority complex are outside the pale of the norms of psychological profiles (whatever the flavor). OK, so maybe an apology is in order in calling Nitai Mahashoy Ji's ultimate destination the nihilist void, which may not be entirely accurate. It was based on what appears to be his Buddhist leanings of late. If an apology is in order, then I have to say I am sorry, and that I am sorry that my posts may just be too boring for this symposium. You see (and here I go again talking about myself) my interests are beyond CV, which is why I read on a variety of subjects, rather than trying to pull out a dictionary and grammar for Sanskrit and Bengali, after literally 40 years of being away from that, to grab any book off my shelf and translate it into English. If I need to apologize for being lazy on that front, so be it. However, there are only so many hours in the day anyways.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 3, 2022 15:42:49 GMT -6
Humm, just found this in one of my feeds, Check it out.
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 3, 2022 17:29:12 GMT -6
'Very interesting' (a reference to that character on the series Laugh-In from the '60s). The other reference ('talk amongst yourselves') was to the character played by Mike Meyers on SNL (the host of coffee talk) - just for those of you that did not catch the reference. Dr. Delmonico should have, since it is assumed he probably saw those segments on the comedy skit show, but maybe he never did. Any youtube search will provide several clips of it.
As far as my purported contentious relationship with science: I had a part time job in high school in a hospital lab. Part of my duties in addition to washing test tubes, was running white cell counts, which was all done on equipment, and the lab technicians did not think they needed to run those themselves, rather take a break for lunch while I was doing it. Then I had a summer job at University of Chicago Hospital Surgical Pathology lab, and part of my duties there were to assist the doctors in getting tissue onto slides to be viewed under the microscope to see if there were cancer cells therein. Not jobs as a scientist per se, but definitely in a medical science setting.
Pseudo science to me just means what is actually called magical thinking, as opposed to the scientific empirical method that requires theories that can be disproven or proven in repeatable experiments under controlled conditions. Alchemy used to be entirely relegated to a complete pseudo science until lead was eventually transformed into gold in laboratories, although the cost to produce a miniscule amount of the yellow metal at this juncture hardly makes that profitable. All those heaviest elements, as a matter of fact, that have been added to the periodic table, only exist in the lab for a split second until they degrade into lighter elements.
So at least one goal of the alchemists of yore was eventually achieved, although not in the way they had originally conceived.
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Post by meeno8 on Jun 3, 2022 23:31:34 GMT -6
How well do those astrophysics indicators work? The only way to know for certain is to pony up the monthly subscription fee and try them out. One thing I know that does work is the branch of mathematics known as stochastic calculus, which is the basis of algorithms used by highly successful hedge funds.
Not to belabor the point, but... Dr. Delmonico, you can cast all the aspersions you like, but the fact remains. In the brokerage firms where I was working from time to time as a broker, I had the respect of the other brokers for being able to accurately call the shots with the buy and sell signals my system generated on various markets. At one of them, they even raised millions of dollars in equity for me to manage, but by that time I had already gone back into software development full time.
Sorry, bro, but all your Sanskrit erudition does not provide you with being able to go toe to toe with me on this particular subject matter at the end of the day. I suggest you stick to your areas of expertise, and I'll stick to mine.
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