Ben Breedlove, 18, succumbed to his heart condition on christmas night... 7 days after posting this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmlTHfVaU9o

I read a Google news piece about Ben that his doctor wrote. The doctor's perspective was an outsider's perspective - outside the truth that Ben had experienced.

See Ya Later, Ben !

That was beautiful thanks for sharing it

Sad, but beautiful, as you say, pondini.

Good advice in the RIP video too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=en ... D0dBwbM8pE

HCM (Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy) is a nasty condition. Very often, the first symptom is sudden death of young, otherwise fit people. My work colleague of over 20 years ago went suddenly whilst watching TV at just 32. He had spells of transient symptoms over the months before, which were apparent whilst at our workplace, but they had always passed off within a few minutes and so he had ignored them. Their significance was only obvious in hindsight, and his family were then all screened for HCM.

Arthur

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"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

my understanding from Tom's guidance is that FWAUs need to lighten up about this death thing.

if Tom is to be believed, one should reframe this to think of it as a lazy or strategic IUOC grabbing a sweet FWAU tour, side-stepping the responsibilities of middle age and the challenges of old age. What a wimp!!!

I would redefine nasty as hanging around PMR in a state of chronic pain that meds won't cloak, and then this should be reframed as PMR post-doc accelerated quality training, by way of example of a perspective reframe

I would imagine there are metaphorical statues erected in NPMR to FWAUs who learn to be kind and inspiring under these sorts of nasty PMR conditions.

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Death is not something to be sought out because you are unhappy here. If you make your own choice in the matter, you won't be punished, but you will certainly be lectured interminably about the wasted opportunity and all the effort you put the system to with nothing for a result, no return on investment, as you missed the later part when all the real learning occurs. One can opt out by request and be accommodated as I experienced with my mother. She could clearly see where Alzheimer's was taking her and 'prayed' to leave, to go back home, for her last months. If she was not being distracted by events, she was repeating over and over, "Jesus, please take me home" quietly to herself. She was confused and ambiguous in her meaning as she in part meant to get home again from the hospital and nursing home/rehab which she did, but died that night. My understanding is that she sought and received permission to leave as she would gain little or nothing from remaining longer nor would anyone else in caring for her. In an ADC, clearly all was well. If you ask in meditation, perhaps you will get an answer. Probably it will be that you have things yet to learn and unlearn and that your QoC can still be improved by remaining here and dealing with your problems rather than try to skip out on them.

Ted

yeah...I see my lack of clarity now and remind myself that we are in Wud I Say

to further clarify, I was not referring to suicide, which would be an FWAU opting for an early PMR exit - I was referring to an IUOC pre-choosing an incarnation life cycle with the likelihood of an early natural death built into the system...if I am using the terminology correctly

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

As I remember, IUOCs do take on known short term assignments to serve the system, knowing that there will not be available a full learning opportunity, according to Tom. This is not something normally given to a beginner but to a long timer who can get some, although limited, value from the experience as opposed to having a beginner lose a real learning opportunity when they need experience. Remember that some even take on dual, simultaneous, PMR roles early in their learning career in the effort to achieve as much benefit as fast as possible.

Also remember that pre choosing a PMR lifetime based upon some particular criterion such as being short time is not as common as some would think, again according to Tom. This kind of life is not as valuable to an IUOC as a full lifetime of experience and all of your guidance would steer you away from it if known about in advance. An old timer will take it on more as a service to the LCS or it will just be a matter of chance.

Ted

I wonder if there is an accepted psychological measurement for empathy (like some sort of Q&A or EEG feedback to various images), presuming empathy is equivalent to or a reasonable faximile of QoC level.

and then do a measure of 5 year olds in two groups, one "normal", and one of kids under palliative care in a children's hospital

this discussion also points to the economics of NPMR...an economist would ask questions like

- what is scarce, and has value? For example, is there a scarcity of PMR incarnation opportunities relative to the number of IUOCs in need of one? A short incarnation would only be less valuable than a long one, if they were scarce?

Or...does the PMR biological simulation unavoidable generate some less than favorable opportunities, regarding various characteristics...such as brevity, and as you say, senior IOUCs "animate" these meatbags as a public service

but one needs to ask, why are two short placements less valuable than one long one?

perhaps an incarnation that is significantly deviant from normal is deemed to painful, too educational, for junior IUOCs

interestingly, the system appears to be very command-control...communistic, which kinda has political implications - perhaps this is where the communistic impulse comes from in PMR, which of course ends up not functioning, given our nature and endless task of wearing down ego

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Randy,

You should develop a habit of doing a search engine search when you 'wonder' about something. A search for "measure empathy scale" on Google returns nearly 6 million hits and this among the first http://www.kaaj.com/psych/scales/emp.html as well as references to scholarly articles. By refining the search, searching within the search, you might find exactly what you refer to.

Regarding the 'economics' of NPMR, the relative scarcity or abundance of opportunities is monitored and balanced by management, according to Tom. They have data bases into the future might be options that help out in this kind of activity. As I remember recently explaining, a short incarnation would generally be considered as less valuable than a long one. It requires time to reach the point that you develop to the point in an incarnation that you start to have significant interactions going past your previous level of development that will affect your IUOC at the being level. Not a matter of absolutes, but certainly on a relative scale. There is a lot of 'overhead' in growing up from the infant stage within the rule set of PMR. This is why suicide is discouraged as contributing to overhead without significant return of investment.

Two short 'placements' are less valuable than one long one for the reasons described above and elsewhere. Basically related to the reasons that development times are measured in terms of MANY lifetimes. Very frequently, the really good stuff comes later on. A short lifetime that will be especially valuable as a growth opportunity for some reason would not necessarily be taken by or reserved for a 'senior' IUOC in terms of development. Management and guidance takes account of these potential values and the developmental needs of all IUOCs in the allocation of choices for a given opportunity. A very short lifetime would more likely be taken by a so called 'senior' IUOC as a service because it has relatively little potential and their loss of opportunity would be less significant than it would be for another. It is all worked out individually fitting needs for development into potential opportunities for growth. Tom has spoken of this but I couldn't refer you to a source.

The LCS/AUM really has well though out the PMR class of VRs. Much research has gone into optimizing the experience and rate of development. It is not just a haphazard drop you in the mill and see if it works out. That is just the limited viewpoint at times from this side of the curtain and when we are tired physically or tired of life as we are finding it this trip.

Ted

i doubt it is intentional but that sounded kinda mean:(

It is the way that I convey information. I say things. Others hopefully listen. There is a constant stream of questions asked on the board that could better be answered by a simple search that has not been done. There is a constant stream of questions asked of me outside the board that people could easily answer for themselves if they would just do what I have to do: do a Google or whatever you prefer search. I know a little bit about a lot of things. But to find details or remember them correctly, I have to do a search. Want to know how to start a business, perhaps with a government grant or loan, that information is available on the Internet and from government sites. You do have to use judgment about where you accept information from. If they perhaps advocate aluminum foil beanies to protect yourself from radio frequencies, I get a little dubious. There are other telltale signs that you can no doubt figure out for yourself.

I used to have encyclopedias and a good number of books. Pretty much all of that is available now almost instantly on the Internet. So if I want the recipe for fudge pudding, like I once made, I do a search and there it is. Much easier than finding my old copy of the Fannie Farmer's cook book. If I want information on a component for an engineering design on which I am working, I look for that information on the Internet first. In my computer I can have more extensive information on products I might use in designs that any library of a company where I worked could ever have. They simply would not have the shelf space. If I want to know about most anything, it can likely be found there on the Internet in more detail than I could possibly remember or probably ever knew. That is just the way that things are now. Anyone not taking advantage of all this free information is losing out on a lot of potential. An internet search was how I first found out about Tom Campbell and his new books. You can go to the Gutenberg Project and find copies of a vast number of classic books to read, all for free. You can go on books.google or Amazon.com and read a fair amount of a book you are considering buying to decide whether to spend the money or not. If you want to know how to apply for food stamps in your locality, you can find it with an Internet search, including the phone number, address and a map to their door. Easier than looking in the phone book. If you want to use a phone book but don't have a current copy or a copy for the location where you want to do the lookup for, that can also be looked up on the Internet.

There was a science fiction story, pre dating the Internet, in which a created person, an android, has a special talent for looking up things of this special information system that was part of the story in which pretty much anything could be looked up that was known within society. From this, the female android had a talent for synthesizing and making predictions and answering questions based on information not specifically available on that information system but open to inference from information that was available. That fictional information system, which was expensive to subscribe to and basically only available to the very wealth and large corporations is pretty much available now to even the poorest as the Internet, presuming that they have a reasonably equipped public library with computers available for the use of library clients.

I am amazed that more persons with computers and Internet connections do not regularly make use of this vast, free library of information on everything that you can imagine to search for. It is the first place that I go if curiosity brings something to my attention.

Ted

for me personally I enjoy the novice vs occasionally-grouchy-zen-master relationship that I have with Ted, but this interaction is of course is about you and Ted, and I don't need to get into the middle of it...but I suppose I will

I see the above interaction as blunt coaching, and I have actually recently asked Ted to give me direct feedback on anything he cares to comment on, in plenary or otherwise, and in your heightened sensitivity/awareness you may be picking up on the abrupt change of interaction.

more generally, on the level of "life hacks", when you have someone of significance constraining your decision space, like a spouse or boss lets say, it can be efficient to invite direct feedback to intensify the benefit of their observations on you, and to deal with issues, unspoken resentments, and to deepen your cooperation for mutual win win basis benefit

for those exposed to the style of zen masters and the egyptian desert monks that predated modern monasticism, Ted's style is a page taken right out of those books and reflects that love is not necessarily a thing of pleasing words and self esteem boosting

the Nazarene warned to beware of becoming like the above ground-tombs, white washed on the outside, and full of worms and awful things on the inside

that being said, sometimes Ted can appear to be quite harsh with rowdy newcomers...its not clear to me if this is an effective forum filtering mechanism or if Ted would be more effective with a softer or at least more polite but firm approach, closer to Tom's style, specifically with newcomers...I really don't know. Perhaps somebody has to be the bad guy to impose order.

my dad the cop said you either reemed someone out with a warning, or gave them a ticket with gentle words, but giving someone a ticket grouchily was high entropy...or words to that effect.

And Ted is the only planetary FWAU willing to take on this thankless task, so beggers can't be choosers.

Part of the proposed forum ruleset (not yet adopted) is that all challenges to management should be humbly submitted by PM to Ted, and sorted out in private, following the Pauline gospellian guidance on disputes among peers...try first to sort things out in private

a failure of satisfaction in this regard would then be bumped up to a PM to Tom, rather than creating a distracting drama in the open discussions...though PMing Tom is not something I have ever done nor would I promote for this purpose

this is how things are handled in professional organizations

Once Ted is ready, he may choose one day to create a forum advisory board, retaining Chair and control, to help with this sort of thing and introduce an element of democratic legitimacy to board governance, and to ensure an ecology that will persist

then the protocol would be for the Board to deal with disputes regarding management rather than having to resort to tasking Tom's bandwidth with this

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

after ted's reply i realize i misinterpreted his post. my mistake:(

i now understand that he was just trying to explain how very useful the internet is for discovering knowledge. it appears ted -like myself- has great zeal for the seemingly endless information that can be found on the net.

and you are correct, randy, i should have PMed him instead. my apologies to ted:)

Pondini,

I have no complaints. You owe me no apology. I have spent a lifetime experiencing others not initially understanding or accepting something I have said or the way that I have said it but on further thought, they get it. As I believe I have told you and written on the board, I think that in part it relates to my matching what I see a lot of those diagnosed as high level Asperger's Syndrome saying about their selves and their perceptions and interactions. It is way too late in life, and too expensive to consider, being diagnosed and going through that kind of process. Too late. What you see is what you get. No significant improvement likely. As far as that goes, the gurus who give us the DSM in version 5 are thinking about totally eliminating the concept of Asperger's syndrome. It seems that too many are being diagnosed and getting services and there is a great wish to reduce the costs and the concept that there are a lot of persons who are substantially different in their perceptions from the standard model accepted as most amenable to command and control. Convenient to be able to modify reality by fiat.

I looked up the new definition of autism on the Internet, it is available, and fortunately it does not seem that it can prevent Arthur, Bette's son, from continuing to be so diagnosed and obtaining services. They do however keep trying to whittle away at what they pay for his 24/7 support. The joys of modern society.

Ted