i've been thinking about this for days and decided it was time to stop thinking and start praising, so here goes:

i think the 2 of u r terrific.....while it's plain that u have wildly divergent ideas about rsd, your arguments r being conducted in debate-club style, rather than the barroom brawls that many of the oldies from BT remember all too well.

so....thx guys for keeping it as an academic disagreement and not a personal level, down-and-dirty, cyber mud-wrestling contest!

I just don't know where I would be without Mike's encouragement to keep up with my efforts to learn about Shinzen Young's outlook on pain relief. It has helped me SO much. I encourage EVERYONE to checkout his book/CD called Breakthrough Pain. Taught me not to be afraid of the pain. Once I was not afraid - most of the stress went out of it, and I could relax through the pain. Hard to explain.... but it works. I still do not think I am very good at it... but it works far better for me than any narcotic I have tried.

I also have been a faithful user of grapeseed extract ever since reading Vic's words about it over a year ago... close to two years ago I would guess. I read EVERYTHING I can find that Vic writes, even though I can't digest it all. I must admit the last thing Vic wrote about cyanosis I took to my veterinarian who is my good friend of 35 years. He helps me with understanding many medical things. He has a LOT more interest in my RSD than any of my Drs. He had out a whole array of medical texts looking up cyanosis. He said he does not have much clinical experience with it, as his patients are to fur covered to see it But we concluded that technically even though my hand turns red, deep red, burgundy and slightly purple red... it could be considered cyanosis by the true meaning of the word... as there are many forms of cyanosis. (don't ask me to explain... as all the reading/explaining he did made me almost more confused than when I went in) .... see... I don't have a blue or gray color at all. That is what I find when I look up cyanosis online.. blue or gray. Mine is red, burgundy mostly, but still icy cold. He spent about an hour explaining why there can be redness meaning there is blood in there, but coldness from lack of properly nutrated blood. I think the idea was that cyanosis does not HAVE to be from lack of oxygen alone.. but a starved cell from more than one reason. I **think** that is the conclusion he drew anyway.

I am REALLY glad that Vic and Mike are part of this forum. REALLY glad. I know I would not be in as good a shape as I am today without them!!!

Jules

Gee, thanks. That's very nice of you all.

Mike

I too appreciate the kind words, and the fact that I have a worthy adversary who plays by the rules.

I believe discussion and debate are the best teaching tools we have, and here’s why: When my children were growing up they knew that the best way to delay, or even avoid a task they didn’t want to do was to ask dad a question about the Bible. They knew I was always good for at least an hour, and mommy knew better than interrupt daddy when he’s talking about God.

They thought they were getting out of work, but the fact is they had to work hard to come up with a question I felt was worthy of an answer. They learned more about Christ and Christianity by thinking up questions than they ever learned in Sunday School, where like all the other kids, they just sat there with glazed eyes and tried to stay awake.

Today, all four of my children are Christians. Like their father, they aren’t what one might call “good Christians”, but they are Christians, and I know we'll always be together. They don’t go to church very often, but they will go to Heaven, and that’s the most important decision any of us will ever make in our lives.

They know God is real and Jesus really rose from the dead because they read the book and they talked about it and we debated it. They thought they were getting out of doing dishes and I did what every father should do: prepare his children for the future. The future of eternity.

I would rather debate Mike than write the perfect article on RSD, because my articles may be informative, but they are about science and most people think science is boring. Our debates are always interesting. (And, yes, I do keep watch on the number of “hits”. Mike and I always get respectable ratings).

What I really appreciate, however, is that both of you ladies have told this Forum that you began taking grape seed extract (GSE) after reading my posts. For one thing, it gets pretty lonely when you think no one at all is paying attention to anything you say.

The best part, though, is that I’m as confident as a human being can be, that you will probably never have to face that moment of gut-wrenching fear that comes with the discovery that another arm or leg will make your lives even more painful.

Like a TV commercial says: "We couldn't say it if it wasn't true". They might lie anyway, but I wouldn't say it if I wasn't convinced its true. And I wouldn’t feel this hopeful for you if I wasn’t sure you have a better chance of avoiding symptom migration than anyone else in this Forum…Vic

Hmm...maybe we should log on as the Vic and Mike show and take it on the road...ok, the Mike and Vic show. I'm a reasonable guy

I just wanted to say that I appreciate that both of you are on here.

I enjoy reading both Mike and Vicc's writing. I enjoy studying RSD and reading as much as I can on the topic, and both Mike and Vicc give me lots of good views as they are on different sides.

Thank you for all the posts. Keep them coming!



And, Vicc... when I have the time and my brain isn't so foggy I would love to ask you some more questions. (that is, if you don't mind them!) I love learning more and you really do present some interesting science, facts and information!

Knowledge is power!

I hope you both are well (as well as you can be with this monster RSD)!

Well, it's funny how with this disease we can sometimes really get ourselves up for doing something we really want to do, only to come crashing down to Earth when it's over.

I got back close to 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning from a quick trip San Francisco to see the Dalai Lama, wheelchair at the ready and under my arm, as it were, for the whole trip. My musician (drummer) brother picked me up at the Oakland airport of Thursday night and we spent most of the next three days together. I had a good time, but I can't say that he is an easy person to spend time with. Still, I'm glad to have done it. The teaching itself was fairly difficult. Two texts on one of my favorite topics, something called "dependent origination," but the first of the texts, written by Nargajuna - the altogether amazing First Century C.E. philosopher who wrote the text that he presented last year in the course of a three-day teaching in Pasadena - was particularly inscrutable in places, and will clearly require more study on my part. Not a bad thing, I suppose.

I understand that Vic has asked that I fill in a little bit what is meant by dependent origination. What follows is adapted from something I wrote a couple of months ago. If you'll bear with me for a moment, it's interesting because it's really far more of a philosophical than a religious construct:

Nagarjuna is credited with extending the doctrine of Dependent Origination – or pratitya-samutpada in the ancient Pali language – the fundamental Buddhist teaching that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions and lack inherent being. Early sources indicate that the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi Tree when he fully realized the profound truth of Dependent Origination, that all phenomena are conditioned and arise and cease in a determinate series.

In his so-called Middle or Madhyamaka School, Nagarjuna, writing five hundred years after tge time of the Buddha, gave a new perspective to Dependant Origination, whereby it becomes associated with the “emptiness” – by that he means only that anything that is empty is devoid of inherent essence – of the composite of the causes and conditions which we conventionally understand as being.

But Nagarjuna did not stop with the “emptiness” of conventional causes and conditions, but the emptiness of emptiness and indeed, the "emptiness" of the most fundamental of Buddhist doctrines (the "Four Noble Truths"), which Nagarjuna explain can have no independent essence but must serve as the description of the relationship between other concepts, namely suffering, craving and aversion. But he further argues in another of his primary texts, “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way,” that not only are concepts such as motion dependently driven - and there is a nice little discussion of what 2,000 years later would be called special relativity - but that emptiness too is empty, i.e., there is no absolute world beyond that which arises conventionally.

This someone doing heavy lifting by any standards of modern Western philosophy but he's funny too, referring to humans as "large bi-peds," and maybe anticipating Darwin for all I know. Clearly, he walked the Earth as a genus, but I hadn't heard of him until I attended the Dalai Lama's teaching at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in September of last year.

In that earlier talk, and then again just last week, the Dalai Lama referred us to Chapter 24 of the “The Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way.” Two verses – 18 and 19 – stand out as central to that Chapter:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.

That, [i.e. emptiness] being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way.
Something that is not dependently arisen,
Such a thing does not exist.
Therefore a non-empty thing
Does not exist.

The import of 24:18 and the Middle School doctrine is that conventional existence and ultimate nonexistence and are the same thing. Hence the deep identity of the two truths. And this is because emptiness is none other than dependent-arising, and emptiness being dependently designated is therefore empty.

But "emptiness" in this context is not nonexistence. The lack of inherent existence that is asserted is not the lack of a property possessed by some entities but not by others, or a property that an entity could be imagined to have, but rather the lack of an impossible attribute. Nagarjuna explicitly and repeatedly rejects nihilism, the doctrine that nothing exists, is knowable or can be communicated. From this perspective the world is quite real, so long as we realize that everything and anything arises only in relationship to everything else.

Returning then to the world of relative arisings, I should say that before I left for my little trip, I signed the final set of papers waiving all contingencies on the purchase of the a new house! In a nutshell, we're moving to the Valley so that my 14 year old son can take advantage of an admission into a very good high school in Chatsworth. It's a huge move for us. We've been in this townhouse in Santa Monica for over 15 years, and even though we've really outgrown it, it is, after all, the only house the kids have ever known.

So on Sunday, both set of brokers where gracious enough to open the house up so that the kids and my mother in law could see it. The kids really liked it. My mother in law, having warned that it was now a done deal and she could only be positive, kept remarking on "how interesting" she found the floor plan to be.

Then last night, we went out to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant in West Hollywood for my birthday. Very nice, I got among other things a book by the Dalai Lama with the same colors on the dust jacket as had been up in the hall in San Francisco with a picture of him looking exactly as he had the day before. (A little spooky, actually.)

So that's what's more or less what's going on with me. Physically, I'm not in great shape. I ran a couple of small errands this morning and now have pretty bad spasms, offset to a certain degree with the warm glow of opioids. Unfortunately, our sitter is on vacation this week, and because I was in no shape to pick up the boys from their respective schools this afternoon, my wife had to leave work early to do so, so fat chance of me making a friend's meditation class which starts tonight. But that's the price I pay for having enjoyed a couple of days of liberation on San Francisco. And what would anyone gladly trade for that?

Mike

Hi Mike,

Cangradulations on your new home. I hope you had a fabulous B-Day. Hugs, Roz

Hi Mike,

What a good thread this is, what a good idea.

Here's wishing you a belated happy birthday. Sounds like your trip was very interesting; yes, the Dalai Lama looks the same whatever decade you see him in. Must be all that yoghurt, LOL.

We've been doing a little in-dependant origination ourselves, over on the "off-topic but fun thread", and I'd just like to point you in its direction. Most of us are there, but not all, and not you. So how bout it, babe?

Your house sounds great; don't mind the mother-in-law, it's their job to be like that I hope you're feeling a bit better,

all the best

Mike,

We are waiting for your photo. Now if someone says NO it's just another opportunity for them to say YES.

Poor Artist was attacked, it's the ladie's turn. I don't have to tell you to be prepared. Love, Roz xxx