Earl Grey

Shoe fetishism Imelda Marcos had it while kids had no food

@Qube I'd like to point out that qigong is not a be-all, end-all solution to mental and emotional traumas, as doing the form alone is only a part of the process for self-realization, self-actualization, self-awareness, and self-awakening, and Self-becoming (capital S). What is helpful are a good community and good teachers, for you can be a good student and have great lineage and a great system, but without the help of others along the path, it is not only difficult to monitor your development, but also get help in areas you may or may not be aware of that are crucial to overall healing. Giving someone who has trauma the Flying Phoenix DVDs for example will not make that trauma go away, but it will definitely help in the overall process with both therapy, counseling, love and support from friends and family, and proper training to develop the skillset necessary to neither project that trauma into unrelated areas in their life nor to revisit the trauma through reminders or triggers. Developing into an empath and wondering about your place in life and awakening are part of the process and the good thing about this forum is that in spite of the varying levels of skill and awareness or qualifications amongst members here, the ability to engage someone, not just talk to them, is a good first step in researching and finding people to relate to so that you don't feel alone in your experience as @Ancestor Paul and @tao stillness exemplify. Staying on this thread and engaging Sifu Terry are great because very rarely does a DVD home study series have easy access to a teacher who is dedicated to his students as he is.

There was no doubt that the people I worked with were happy, but that doesn't rule out that people wanted access to these things--because they specifically requested cooperation. This also does not account for the fact that this access is critical to sanitation (soap), healthcare (people live far away from any hospital and when at risk for malaria or dengue among other things, this is crucial), and participation in their provincial government. And little or no incidents of reported crime is a very different thing than what I've worked on when people have sold their own children to syndicates or trafficked them for income. Happiness is a state of being and great, but when someone is hungry or someone has to walk 5km each way for water daily (if it's even available at all--see the crisis in India now), to them, it's a platitude. A Chinese-Thai woman once told me that money can't buy love and happiness, but money at times sure makes falling in love and being happy easier. I didn't agree with her because she seemed to think everything revolved around money and was a product of the capitalist society that fueled her business in Bangkok, but it illustrates the attitude of survival and scarcity, which, sadly the capitalistic system has produced far more than wealth and prosperity opportunities that it promises. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth showing pictures of the places we worked in and how they are a lot different than how Westerners define "rural", because Barstow, California is a lot different than living in the middle of Eastern Indonesia or Cambodia. The definition of "poverty" in development is better explained at this link: https://www.concernusa.org/story/top-9-causes-global-poverty/ You may believe in what is not "poor" but development work likes to focus on access to basic human amenities as described in the link above. There's also a big difference between someone who was a Wall Street-type who lost his money and goes around snorting coke in the alley versus someone in the Philippines who is being pushed down by the global power structures that encourage deceit. While I applaud the organizations you have posted that appear predominantly focused on Americans, I will note that many of the organizations listed in the sites I have posted are locally-founded, locally-managed, and local stakeholder focused--so I'm not sure how recruiting people who are of foreign nationality suddenly makes this colonialist. For example, the children's hospital in Cambodia where I worked in: is it colonialism to want specialists in fields such as oncology, when many healthcare professionals there do not have the training to identify early stages of retinoblastoma? Without requesting either volunteers or full-time staff as we have had from Australia, Canada, the US, New Zealand, and UK, we would neither have the ability to train local staff or even the 2 individuals available in the whole country who could treat this, when retinoblastoma is easily preventable in developed countries. Due to lack of ability to recognize it or lack of resources to treat it if identified early enough, it was about 75% more common in 2014. All: as I've said before, development work tends to unintentionally parallel and confirm Marxian theory, there is a big difference in that much of the development work done is not core and periphery or trickle-down economics. Social enterprise in particular by nature is often small and occasionally medium size because once it gets too large, the focus on the community is harder since the mission trying to expand treads a fine line between capitalist growth for wealth rather than trying to work within the existing paradigm in order to ensure the people who are left out get the things that they want. Here's an example from Sri Lanka of a social enterprise project: when the Civil War destroyed many people's homes and businesses, many of the victims were women who lost their husbands and sons, their limbs and became the sole providers. What was opened was a resource center with several members who received formal training in the capital for counseling and trauma, returned with some local citizens in both professional and volunteer capacities to help manage and monitor and evaluate the project. In addition to providing grief counseling and helping form women's support groups, they were offered training in things from weaving to coconut refinery and small agriculture. I have so far not seen anyone with formal training in international development work (aside from Drew whose research at a macro level is actually quite good) and for a forum that focuses on Taoist principles and nature, it is easy to see that there is an idealized kind of view of nature and rural living. I myself enjoy rural living and simplicity. However, for the globally marginalized, it's a totally different thing when you have to raise multiple children and provide for your family with limited resources that states are theoretically supposed to guarantee their constituents as outlined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Let us return to Thailand to the north with the Isarn/Esarn minority, otherwise known as ethnic Lao in regards to development: they do not speak or identify as Thai, the government even before the military junta often gave less funding for education, electricity, textbooks, and healthcare, and educational professionals often asked for bribes on top of tuition fees. People from Isarn are disengaged from the country, systematically neglected, and the dropout rate and community health remains poor. The result is alarming as people turn to drugs, crime, prostitution, and can even end up trafficked--not too dissimilar from inner city living in North America. Add a few lazy westerners seeking what they believe is easy money teaching English there, and then you find things get worse as the quality of education is equal to the level of training, which many of these teachers have no more than a month or two of online TESOL or TEFL training. NGOs come in where the government fails and seeks to alleviate these issues while holding the government accountable. Granted, there are many dubious NGOs who have been outed as scammers, but to say the concept itself is bad is akin to saying that a doctor is bad because the medication you were given gave you diarrhea so all doctors and hospitals are bad when really it's that one individual. Let me discuss again the town of Siem Reap where I worked and the begging syndicate. Many of the beggars you see during the morning in Angkor Wat or around Pub Street are actually children who are pulled out of school to beg, children who have been given extra care and training from multiple organizations to oversee critical early childhood development. That money does not even go to their families, it goes to the syndicates that recruit them and give them a small cut since they believe they can earn more begging from tourists, and in the long run for development, you will have a large swathe of society that resorts to begging rather than people who have education, professional skills, and life skills that help them make choices that are healthier and safer rather than focusing on money and gratification. The milk scam is a common example: some child will go to an Australian tourist and ask not for money, but for milk for them and the baby they are carrying, and lead them to a store to buy milk. Later on, the child will return the milk and get a cut of the money with the vendor there as they divide it amongst themselves and return it to their pimp. I will add that the baby they are carrying is not even their own, but another "rented" child for sympathy. NGOs and social enterprises along with other groups come in to educate people about this and get them away from this desperate measure for easy income so that they can decide their own fates without resorting to dishonest and deceitful means that in the long run will create a generation of people who know nothing but begging and petty crime, and institutionalize it through syndicates. Social enterprises come in when locals and even a few partners from the outside come in with ideas, resources, and labor to create opportunities that were otherwise denied access to them before. For this next example, I will use an American domestic social enterprise to illustrate how society failed this marginalized group and how some enterprising individuals gave hope to these people who have fallen between the cracks: Crossroads Cafe, a San Francisco-based social enterprise, not only hires former convicts, but gives them life skills in their training, counseling, and support for further reintegration into society. How many times is someone just put on a bus in the middle of the night with no formal exit training after being freed from incarceration? This same thing happens to people who come out of the military. How hard is it for someone to get a job with a criminal record in America? Next to impossible some may feel. It then reinforces the cycle that pushes them to desperate measures and back into prison. Desperation and poverty, lack of community or sense of self, a home and a means to support themselves, this is not helpful to anyone, especially the society that shits on these former convicts. Long story short: the capitalist power structure shits on people. There are efforts from NGOs locally and internationally trying to help come in, and there are efforts from social entrepreneurs evolving society bottom-up. It is not perfect by any means, but we're doing our goddamned best to serve the marginalized and the forgotten through the concept of social enterprise and development without having to argue about platitudes that most people have little time to laugh about with rewilding or being happy free of clean water and electricity and adequate representation and governance, especially when they struggle to feed their families and give them opportunities to escape the poverty cycle.

Their desire. I'm talking about people in Eastern Indonesia and Northern Sri Lanka for example, people who we once marveled at how they could live well, and they said they wanted modern plumbing, electricity, roads that lead them to a hospital with medicine that is available when needed, and Internet. My experience with rural in the Global South is that they didn't have clean water or had to take 2 buses and a boat for 14 hours just to get to a provincial hospital, which is a problem when diseases run rampant and many people tough it out just to avoid the long trip to town. But what do I knoweth, fer Faulke's sick...

Anarchist, not socialist. I advocate for people to find what it is they can offer (go see what Burning Man was like before Silicon Valley Bros took over), but if they're just sitting on the corner shooting up, then what? "If people acted the way that they should then there wouldn't be any need for government" but we are too damned optimistic about human nature. Rewilding is a wonderful idea, but in practice, tell that to people in the rural areas that their desire to have a "modernized" place is a bad idea. Am I saying that I wouldn't like people to go back to nature? No, what I'm saying is that convincing people what is good for the planet when it conflicts with human desires and preferences is damned challenging. Check these out: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slum-tourism-brazil-india-south-africa_n_3237489 and https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/shanty-town/index.html

Tickle him silly with names, schools, and gold: they mean nothing to a sage!

"小念大头" was the term given to us before explain the variations of a practice, whether it is Eight Brocades or Five Animals or Five Elements.

Two altar boys decided to have some fun after finding a dead horse on the road not far from the monastery. Removing its phallus, they toss it in the middle of the garden where the nuns have their afternoon walk. Observing from behind the trees, they watch two puzzled young nuns unable to figure out what this strange, cylinder-like object that looked like a snake was. So they called in the Abbess. The Abbess comes, looks, and cries out in sorrow, "Oh no! The Archbishop is dead!"

I don't know what sources you use, but according to Thomas Ashley-Farrand, the wrong pronunciation stimulates different chakra petals, and making up your own mantras can cause you to literally burn since you don't know what they're doing. Look up his books or consult one of the lineage teachers for advice. www.sanskritmantra.com

Wow, you learned a new word after everyone used it to characterize your reasons for posting all the crap that you say in every thread. Proud of you! Too bad your comprehension skills for "homeless" fail you and you equate my having loyalty to no homeland as being the same as recognizing just how you're about as welcome as a panhandler. Enough to know that I have more pride in what I have learned, things I have done, and things I know than a busybody like you, whose primary claim for authority is copying and pasting memes or reciting alien conspiracy theories and tying them to colonialism, taking posts off topic more often than not. Or perhaps it's best characterized as a healthy intolerance for mediocrity and your egregiously poor rhetoric. OH THIS IS RICH, COMING FROM YOU OF ALL PEOPLE! For someone with the abysmal intelligence you display in your posts, if your understanding of history and sociology are anything to go by, your authority on psychology is likewise just as dubious. At least I have the dignity of knowing I've done a lot more in my brief life that led to more good for the planet and people than you ever will with your inane tirades. When you can demonstrate your educational credentials, foreign experience proving you aren't a product of a parochial podunk, or work in the service of a higher calling and thusly earned value so that others can vouch for you with sincerity and gratitude, I can't take you seriously. Until then, you are nothing more than the guy about town who butts into the conversations of other people who don't even know him, speaking about things you haven't got a clue about, and proving nothing more than that you have absolutely zero relevance to anything you poke your nose into. Here's a good place to start: https://www.idealist.org and https://www.devex.com/jobs if you actually have anything of value to offer to people who could use it.

I fancy my namesake usually for afternoon tea, but I'll see if they stock these as well, old chap. But I must implore you to join me sometime if I do procure some of these! In the meanwhile, I recommend this: https://lelandtea.com/product/garbos-peachy-blend/

Considering John the Baptist and the Essenes with their communal living, this is true historically that they had values parallel to our views we might idealize as socialist. How the Religious Right failed to understand the fundamental message of Jesus of unconditional love, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness is still baffling to many devotees of the faith. Gandhi once was perhaps apocryphally attributed to say something along the lines of "I like Christianity, but I am not a fan of Christians" and a parallel statement was also said by Jack Kornfield to Duncan Trussell that the teachings of the Buddha ask people to become Buddhas, not Buddhists. When a teaching becomes a doctrine, the doctrine becomes susceptible to interpretation, and interpretation becomes subject to revision, and revision becomes preface to ideology, and ideology becomes a new teaching, completely divorced from the original teaching.

Aha! An absolute statement! From a fool who neither lives it himself nor in possession of the cognitive ability to prove its veracity! My dear young ape, I am reminded of the pompous busybody who in acknowledging the meaningless of his solitary existence due to the constant offering of his unsolicited, unqualified, unauthorized, and unwanted advice, takes it upon himself to pester anyone in possession of a pair of ears. Whether ‘tis the bombastic fundamentalist shouting at the top of his lungs in places of public gathering, or the adamant missionary standing outside the door to your home, the homeless tramp endeavoring to join you at your table at the restaurant and offering you the unverified story of how he was the richest man in Providence and how he can make you your fortune too, or the bombastic drunkard bellowing in your ears in the tavern, or the nettlesome salesman following you to the ends of the earth, they all share but one thing in common: they are the gregarious castaways and cutouts of society who have room for one more to join their swelling ranks. That individual is the tenacious testicle termite we all know affectionately as Gendao. Dear sullen baboon, when you’ve something to contribute of value, do ring the church bells and bring out the cake, for until then, none of us are holding our breath for you to realize the tales of sound and fury signifying nothing coming from your direction are no different from the flatulence of an elephant or a rat. And still, whether from a field mouse tickling your ankle or a hippopotamus you desire to sodomize, flatulence is flatulence and unwanted, yet flows freely like the words from your mouth. Dear friends, let us move forth and mourn not the absence of Gendao the bombastic baboon’s ramblings, and instead continue this enrapturing conversation on leftist discourse, for he will return soon enough with the same drivel, time and again.

not a word by carps nor a shred of evidence, yet: here be dragons!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that repeating the same nonsense again and again makes the speaker feel more authoritative on matters he forces himself into, whether it is politics or proctology, and in doing so, feels he has accumulated more prestige because he has managed to allege the connection between seemingly unrelated fields through the sheer force of his own stubborn certainty. We can rest assured that people with mental health problems won't necessarily take up arms and focus their crosshairs on the masses, but they will incessantly post online all the abortive filth spawned from the barren wasteland of their mediocre minds, and Gendao is a fine example of this.

Dreaming of dragons inspires the upstream journey of determined carps

It seems like you are stating that the qi and the radiance of the color are separate things, which is not necessarily the case. Tao Stillness explained quite well above and it's been discussed in many pages here on this thread, but if the answers still aren't clear, Sifu Terry will chime in if he feels is necessary to clarify and expand upon what was posted above and earlier in the thread too.

What I talk about is inescapable is the connecting of the world. Globalization is to me a form of connecting that feels more like a compression of the world--but you're talking about the current form, I'm talking about a way of uniting the world, and perhaps the name or form wouldn't be globalization under a capitalist model. I'd love to see that. Yes, doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome each time is a textbook example of insanity, but there are factors we aren't watching and that as my links mention, are out of our control unless we actually resist. I'm all for an anarchic world of social entrepreneurs. This is common that many social enterprises fail, just like many businesses fail, but that's often because a lot of the younger entrepreneurs are experiencing this model of capitalism for the first time if not their first actual experience full stop. I've monitored and evaluated many projects in Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Uganda, and what was evident was that their business plan was weak. You have a bunch of college graduates managing things with a good heart, college kids volunteering, and a very happy community and entrepreneurs working together who may get some donations or investments from private individuals or small to medium organizations. The weakness in one example was actually surprising: they prepared to deal with poverty, but they couldn't deal with scaling up as their microfinancing ended up earning too much money. And like Sparta after the Peloponnesian War fell to Athenian money and greed, the stakeholders weren't used to managing outside of their immediate community as people came from other villages to borrow. This planted the idea that they could be rich, which they saw quickly frightened them and the whole thing lost its heart fast. As I said, stakeholders are the most important, and as I've seen in Cambodia, the real miracles were watching former sex slaves receive not just a paycheck, but training in life skills from accounting to English to programming and basic computer skills, who would then also own shares in the enterprise, train other incoming trainees, and graduate to manage or to work and earn higher income in Phnom Penh at an NGO or found their own business from a yoga studio to a coffee group and managing their own restaurants. NOTE: Earlier, this post was mistakenly addressed to dawei and has been subsequently edited upon checking and seeing my error, so lines have been removed to reflect that the individual, Taomeow, whom I am addressing, is done with adoration and respect rather than cold rebuttal.

Before you make another passive-aggressive comment like that dawei, allow me to clarify that I was never asked what was the definition of the current model, nor was it something I knew you were asking to know. I simply pointed out that you were using a false comparison. Now, having said that, here's how I'd characterize the current model of globalization. The current model of globalization is more neoliberal than anything else. The documentary Commanding Heights discusses the conservative revolutions of Thatcher and Reagan that made more prominent the capitalistic free market model we have now and expanded the ideas that were already in action prior to this, which you can also read about in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Now, coming from a background in international development, there are several layers of reality to look at, which is one that involves people genuinely concerned with helping underdeveloped countries gain access to education, universal suffrage, human rights, clean water, health care, electricity, and more. You will find the most sincere people in smaller NGOs, grass roots movements, and social enterprise. The next level is full of the opportunists who fuel the conspiracy theorists in their dishonest behaviors, such as the diplomats who abuse their privilege to get deals, which you can see commonly in the Belt Road Initiative, such as this one where it can either be done by design from the state level up or from independent agents looking to get away with a cut of their own, as we see in Kyrgyzstan. Then there's one that is not a conspiracy but a serious issue that Americans have engaged in, but are not alone as we see China has done so, Russia too, and UK. It is similar to debt diplomacy as we see in the BRI in many countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and the Philippines. As elaborated on in Confessions, a lot of promises for aid from government organizations, especially USAID, came with major strings attached, which were exclusive trade deals and access to resources and the market, shares, and what amounts to essentially creating satellite states who were analogous to vassals for barons in Feudal times. The hypocrisy behind it is that it was done in the name of free trade, but free trade in this case means sweat shops in Mexico and Banana Republics in Latin America, which, even today, we can see in Peru that while it can help with competitive advantage, in the long run, it isn't so great using quinoa as an example from this article on NPR. And while promising free trade for all, the biggest winners are the G7, whether it is Canada and their mines in East Africa and Southeast Asia to the EU subsidies affecting African farmers. Let's not forget how tech companies in Silicon Valley and the world of apps are creating more disparity even in India rather than creating more opportunities. Americans are not unique as I already mentioned, but they are the ones who deny it more than the others in spite of being prominently outed by Perkins. It is akin to each of the G7 pretending to be best friends in uniting the world but going behind each other's backs to get better deals. In short: globalization in its current model isn't meant to be a great equalizer for anyone, it's meant to export capitalistic ideology and allow certain groups more privilege while pressing down others, paralleling Marxian theory and criticisms of capitalism inadvertently, but not confirming them. And more often than not are the west, but also include China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Israel, UAE, and Saudi Arabia to dominate through financial institutions. You can learn more from Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine in her book or the documentary. How it should be different is anyone's guess, but I at least know what I do not want based on the many links and references that I have given here rather than just leaving it all to conjecture after giving platitudes and conspiracy theories. EDIT: what I would like and do know works is social enterprise, where it is trickle-up development rather than trickle-down, and the focus is on stakeholders before shareholders. Educate yourself on social enterprise to see why it works on a small scale and has potential to be a big global force for change.

How cool is that? I love both PKD and tarot and it was only a matter of time before this came. Now if only an Alan Moore deck could come out... and even just a Promethea deck!

Not sure if he is serious either, but in any case, I think you are using a false comparison for an analogy since he's talking about something with serious consequences versus consumer choices. I am not a fan of the current model for globalization since it has produced winners and losers, mostly the latter, but I do believe globalization is inescapable, and thus a better form than it is currently executed it is something I would love to see if it ever appears.

Immortals no less care about good and evil as shrug about it