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Both marbleheads and my suggestions are good. When it comes to laozi I prefere Henriks translations myself, but if you're going to buy both Lau's and Henricks (which i recommend) I recommend you first buy Lau's and read throught that and then buy Henricks' translations (notice the plural here) becuase that is the chronology of their release and as such you'll get the scholastic progressin in order, but ti really doesnt matter and as i said I prefere henricks myself. As for zhuangzi there are ups and downs, Ziporyns doesn't have all the chapters, but then again there is a reason why, and it also has a lot of historical comments which are interesting. And once again getting both would be adviced, though for scholastic reasons you might want to buy watsons first here and then use Ziporyns for further details at a later state.

It is. His translations are great.

In general, no one English translation is good enough, and in general english translations are inherently flawed and one really have to go back to the source with the full knowledge of the sociolingusitic context to fully understand it. But most people will not walk down that road, or have not walked it long enough to be able to do this and for such people I suggest that one finds one of the english versions who atleast discusses the problems of translating and tries to give some insight into the sociolinguistic context. A great introduction to this is D. C. Lau's Bilingual Edition, which although not perfect does infact give one a good starting point in these matters. As for Zhuangzi, I do recommend Brook Ziporyn's version for similar reasons even though it is rather limited. But of course if one is limited to english it is always best to get many versions and sources.

I seem to percieve an increase of Neidan in the west recently, more courses are being held, and more people seem to be practicing it than before. Has anyone else noticed it? This otherwise rather less well known practice seems to have gained more widespread recognition, which I think is rather good in itself. But at the same time I think this attention might come with an increased risk of false teachers and unserious practitioners. Even so is this not better than Neidan being obscure and mostly unknown? It's hard enough to find someone that teaches proper Neidan as it is today, if we end up having lot's of unserious teachers will finding a serious teacher become even harder?

That depends entirely on what sort of treatment you get, you should ask your acupuncturist.

I have to disagree, i think this is a misconception. Generalisations are not really the problem, the problem is the misunderstanding of how generalisations work, and the faulty induction of properties to generalisations. I would even dare to say that the more generalisations a person has the less the person is likely to make such false inducitons. That is not really a generalisation You're ascribing qualities to a generalisation which are not part of the generalisation, thus commiting to a faulty generalisation, which is indeed not truly a generalisation. The way we see generalisations and recognise faulty generalisations is important, and people making faulty generalisations are indeed the kind of people that see things in black or white, but to say that these people have many gneeralisations is not really correct, we should say that they make many faulty generalisations instead.

There is no reason to adhere to any specific system or tradition. What you practice will be your personal practice. Even traditions have changed through time because every person in a lineage will do their own personal variant, though fo course lineages does have themes and are dependent on teachers often teaching very similar methods. There are many system in which there are ideas of what you should do with energies, how you should move them around and so on. But I suggest that you let you energies have their natural flow, to listen in on what is happening rather than trying to force energy one way or another. In general there are many ways one can get hurt by trying to move energy when one does not fully understand the implications of altering a presumably natural flow. I have personaly had some bad experience is doing things along those lines when i was younger and i have heard countless of stories of the similar experiences. As a person that can easily feel this energy flow you have the advantage of trying to understand it by seeing what happens with it in different situations in your life. What and how is this energy flow affected by your experiences? But if you want to do seomthing more actively I suggest breathing techniques and meditation, and looking at how your energy system is affected. If you are interested in learning how these energies work in a more formal way but without actually necessarily actually doings something actively with your energies, then you can study TCM which although not perfect does indeed touch on the basics of how they work. Ones you have a better understanding you will be able to judge if a method, system or lineage is worthwhile or not.

This is something that my experience has thought me aswell, consitency in the sense of continuation and habits is what makes good practice. And focus should be to build this consistency and making it a habit, in a Daoist sense this can be intepreted as to make your naturallness that of practices. Atleast this is one part of naturalness.

I like to use it in the sense of ignoring people or phenomenon that are not worthy of attention is blissfull. But that is very far from it's original meaning.

Actually 'Ignorance is bliss' is a very complex expression and has many different aspects to it. But it's assumed original meaning is that it is sometimes more comfortable to not know something than knowing it. It is however used in many different context nowdays and carries a much more complex set of meanings.

I agree that this is not the place for the discussion, though I'm not sure where the correct place would be. Once the discussion is mature we can create a post that can be stickied here though.

I suggest we start a thread about discussing the contents of a proposed stickypost that is a suggestions of things to discuss in this forum such as the excelent question thelerner posted. Anyone else interested in this idea?

What is it that dies from a purely physical viewpoint? Oxygen is harmfull for your lungs if you inhale it.

It's always worthwhile to analyse and consider usage of language, it is a great tool in understanding the mind.

We should generalise when we want to talk about a general concept, and we should be more specific when we want to talk about that which is more specific. In otherwords we should be as specific as is appropriate for that which we want to express. When talking about the group of people that satisfies the term 'all smokers' we simply refere to the all individual that smokes. When we make statements about generalisations that can not be said to be true for that generalisation we can't be said to be wrong in the sense of having misused a generalisation but should instead be said to have commited some sort of fallacy in our logical conclusion on what applies to that generalisation. We can be said to misuse a generalisation if we meant to talk about something more specific than the generalisation itself. That is if we say fruit instead of bananas when we mean to talk about bananas. If we however assert logically that fruits have a certain attribute because bananas have them, then we mean to use the term fruit but have commited to the inductive fallacy. This of course is often termed faulty generalisation. And yes then generalisation of a certain attribute can be sad to be wrong, but the problem lies not in the usage of the generalisation but of the induction of properties.

But what is it to die?

I think the word Dao is a relevant and valid term, because it describes something that is without being termed itself very inconcisely expressed. And it is usefull to use it in a descriptive sense of a tacit concept that can be experienced. I also find that talking about this experience is both intresting and rather important.

Actually, the fact that they live long does not in anyway suggest they are not damaging their health. Health is not really correspondent to mortality. I find it hard to belive that their lungs will not be affected at all. In fact any form of smoking does, just the heating and particles in general is bad so smoking regardless of what substance is generally bad for your health, though it might be a very small effect, one that most people are not aware enough to notie. Nicotine does indeed have a rather toxic substance and even in lower dosage it messes up your natural balance of neurochemistry. That is enough to call it unhealthy in my book no matter if it gives you any other symptoms or decreases your mortality. Sure statistics show that some do live long while smoking, but ofcourse this is no indication at all of their health, understanding how to intereprete specific data is important aswell as understanding statistics.

We can't really talk about Dao itself but we can talk about how to experience Dao. Here is a video of someone talking about that in modern terms.

I do both internal martial arts and bodyweight training, it is the core of my bodily practice(s).

So should these so called frequent flyers not engage the newcomers in this forum, or should they simply be more lenient in this forum?

That really doesn't explain it either. Not really, no. Humans are only things because we designate them as things, and the same designation applies to Dao. But truly humans are not things, in the same way Dao is not a thing. Likewise Dao is a thing just as Humans are things. But you claim that humans are things even though Dao is not a thing, therefore i wonder how you consider humans to be a thing without Dao to be a thing.

Because it's not as simple as using an established term, epsecially if your are yourself used to it. That is why we have so many words for so many things. When the first drill was invented poeple might first have described it as a thing that spins around a sort of cutting device which then makes a hole, but pretty fast people would start using a single word for it because it is far more convinient than having to use a long description of it all the time. And in specific contexts many words exist that are not very usable outside of this contex. This is usualy refered to as jargon, something that exists in many different settings, certain types of work or industries, certain fields of study. And most people outside those contexts simply don't know the associeted jargon. And in philosophy there is a lot of jargon. In daoism there is also a lot of specific terms that are not really used outside of their daoist context. I didn't bring them back, I just explained to you what the terminology was. That the cup is not an ontological object means that it is not really real. But what it means to say that the cup is real but not ontological, is that which the mental construct we call the cup referese to is a part of reality that defact exists even though it is not an ontological object. We know this because we all agree that we can experience the cup. That is what it means for it to be real. This is generally agreed upon by most of the major schools of though throughout the world, and the cup example is even used by many different traditions, I've heard it used by both philosophers and Buddhists. Though the terminology I used is from philosophy because that is the tradition that is mostly interlinked wiht the english language. In Buddism a completely different terminology exist to explai the very same thing, but we are currently discussing this in english so it is most appropriate to use terms that are closer to the english language i.e. terms from philosophy. If the rest of humanity shares it, then it is by definition not subjective, unless ofcourse you are a solipsist. That does not at all explain why the future exists as a construct yet is not part of reality. Furthermore that is not what conciousness is.

Does this mean, that new members are encouraged to bring up questions or other topics worthy of discussion here rather than in their initial post in the welcome forum?