Derek Cameron

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Psychology and religion

Though I have had mystical experiences myself, I am now ambivalent about mysticism. The disappearance of a separate self is simply an oddity of human psychology. It has some therapeutic value, but I doubt the wisdom of making it into a life-goal.

• Experiences at Marywood and on the Coquihalla Highway. Christian mystical experiences during 2010 and 2011.
• Mysticism as Regression. A critical view of mysticism. Mysticism as conventionally understood is simply regression to an infantile state of consciousness.
• Slain in the Spirit? It's a Stage Hypnotist's Trick. It's well known that there is no Biblical precedent for being "slain in the Spirit," the phenomenon whereby Pentecostals fall backwards, supposedly under the influence of the Holy Spirit. In fact, it's little attested at all before the twentieth century. From the earliest days of the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street, Charles Fox Parham suspected that hypnosis was at work.
• The Book of Privy Counseling in Middle English. The Book of Privy Counseling was written in England in the late fourteenth century. As with other texts on mysticism, it advocates the abandonment of symbolic thinking in favor of more primitive layers of consciousness. html, pdf
• Can meditation help with anxiety or depression? As a treatment for anxiety, TM is no more effective than simply sitting still with your eyes closed.
• The Case Against Mysticism. One-sided mysticism conveys "a different spirit than the Spirit of Christ." That kind of mysticism is deceptive, is foreign to Christianity, impairs functionality in the external world, and leads to occultism.
• Can Christians do yoga? Many Christians claim that modern postural yoga is antithetical to Christianity, on the grounds that it forms part of the worship practices of a non-Christian religion.
• The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud (1923) html, pdf
• The Order of the General Fast by John Knox (1565) html, pdf

Computers and networking

How-to articles for your home computer.

• Port forwarding on TELUS NH20A. Set up and test port forwarding on your home router.
• Create an OpenVPN server on Linux. Using the free community edition of OpenVPN rather than the OpenVPN Access Server commercial offering.
• Create an OpenVPN server on Windows. How you can configure an ordinary home PC to act as an OpenVPN server.
• IKEv2 server using strongSwan. Create a strongSwan IPsec/IKEv2 server on Debian/Ubuntu Linux.
• Create an L2TP/IPsec server on Linux using SoftEther. How to use SoftEther to create an L2TP/IPsec server on Linux.

Nutrition

Statistically, pescatarians are the longest lived. However, Scots may be genetically adapted to a meat-based, low-carb diet.

• Experimenting with a pescatarian diet. Low-fat, whole food, plant-based diet with the addition of small amounts of fish.
• The Scots are carnivores. As late as the year 1600, the diet of the highlanders still consisted of cheese, meat, and milk.

Small print

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