One day as the great theologian and scholar Shankara was walking to the temple in Varanasi, he crossed paths with a beggar, and as was the custom at the time, gestured to the man to keep his distance. The beggar spoke, saying “great sage, do you address me as one body, made of food, to another? Or as one eternal consciousness to another? Is not the supreme being reflected in every object just as the sun is? Is not its reflection on the sacred water of the Ganges the same as that on a puddle in a muddy street? Is water any different, if it is in a golden vessel or in a clay pot?


From these comments Shankara recognized that the beggar was none other than the great God Shiva. He replied, saying “any one who convinces himself that he is that very essence, that witnesser of all things, which is manifest in all conditions and in all objects, from the highest God to the tiniest insect, is an enlightened one and a teacher regardless of his social standing. It is due to ignorance and illusion that men believe the universe to consist of different things, but anyone who in contemplation of the absolute realizes its identity with himself is a great master. Indeed, the entire universe is transitory, but the man who follows the innate direction of humanity in meditating constantly on the infinite and supreme being will cleanse his imperfections in sacred fire. That man realizes within himself the truth and quality of the supreme being, which in the uncontemplative man is hidden by ignorance as the sun is hidden by clouds. Indeed, I am convinced that the man who has his mind fixed always upon that great being worshipped even by the Gods and is thus at peace with himself has not only understood the supreme being, but in fact is that very same. Thus, Lord, in body I am your servant. In life, I am a part of your self. In soul, you are within me and within every other.”

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Dr. Donald Tashkin, a UCLA pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.

They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lit up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.

"This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."

Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar.

While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana use in their youth, when it is most frequently tried.

For convenience's sake I will hereafter simply copy and paste this into every religious thread I find on the forums

Religion...religion has always been splintered into innumerable groups. In fact, there are as many varieties of religious belief as there are people who believe. The violence and disputation associated with religion stems from peoples' fundamental inability to see past each others' differences and truly understand others' feelings, thoughts, and beliefs.

As Aldous Huxley wrote, "We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

The growing self-insularity of people in this modern age means that we understand each other less and less, we divide ourselves up into more and more factions over semantics, misunderstandings and foolish disagrements which have no real existence. Given the spiritual and metaphysical substance of religion, it is easier to see this fact with regards to religion, but it also holds true for every other area of life. One must realize that truth can only be determined by looking inwards, through the lens of one's self, the only lens through which ayone can perceive the world. Through meditation and yogic techniques one can improve the clarity of this lens, reduce the psychologically harmful effects of self-insularity, and come to a better realization and understanding of the world and other people as they are within themselves.

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I'm the black shape that you can kindof see lighting the shit and getting out of the way of the explosion