Old River

It doesn't really mean anything-- I'm just referring to the typical everyday chatter that I'd in my own mind (the so-called "monkey mind"). I wouldn't go so far as to say that the paranormal doesn't exist, but I've had no experience with anything like that-- it has never made much sense to me.

I have enough difficulty "reading" my own mind-- how in the world would I be able to "read" someone else's mind?

I have Watson's Essential. I'll be out of town and internet-less all next week, but beyond that, count me interested.

A film I cherish: Kurosawa's Ikiru ("To Live")

"Other" for both poll questions... My motivaton is largely to cultivate a sense of peace in myself and in my local environment (wherever I might be). That's my short answer, at any rate.

No one should be surprised about this... Here come the bathroom vigilantes: https://www.yahoo.com/news/bathroom-bill-supporters-police-public-restrooms-222212246.html Next up, lynch mobs, or maybe a pogrom. I'm not joking. It isn't history that repeats itself, but distorted human nature.

I have two blogs - one specifically Daoist-related, the other a bit more tangential: http://way-and-wayfarer.tumblr.com ... this is my work-in-progress of my version of the Dao De Jing. and http://onceness.tumblr.com ... this is my journal interspersed with my poetry. Many of the posts bear some relation to Daoism, though not always so obviously. This blog doesn't get updated as regularly as the DDJ one.

As is New Zealand... Meet Georgina Beyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgina_Beyer And she was elected in 1995. New Zealand has often been ahead of the curve on a lot of issues. I consider it more home to me than the US (I only lived there three months, but desperately tried to emigrate there in 2007. I've gone back to visit a few times since then).

Fascinating, Dawei... I see how Red Pine's redaction in his translation also uses heng in chapter 1 instead of chang. He doesn't go into near as much detail, but he does say this much, echoing your own findings: "...In lines two and four, I've used the Mawangtui heng (immortal) over the standard ch'ang (eternal), which was introduced to avoid an emperor's personal name. Heng also means "crescent moon," a not accidental change in light of Lao-tzu's emphasis on lunar images when talking about the Tao..."

Oh, don't talk to me about bad memory -- I'm too well-acquainted with that fellow. --And thanks for catching my slip -- fixed!

Thank you for this, Spotless -- this is something I should take to heart also. Finding myself on the far left side of the spectrum, I only allow myself to get needlessly riled up just as well. My response-ability begins with my own responses.

I've only read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and I thought it was spot on. Worth a read for sure.

Sorry, can't resist....

There's so much that is lost in translation with Greco-Roman philosophy because so many of the words used either don't translate over into English well, or the English word works well, but the meaning of the word has changed so much over the years, and so it is easy to misinterpret anachronistically. This was a stumbling block for me when I first started delving more deeply into Greco-Roman philosophia, especially Stoicism which interested me for a time. Even the names of the schools imply something different from the original meanings -- Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, Cynic. The Greek "Logos" was a metaphysical principle, not "reason" in the modern sense of the word. The Greek word "nous" is often inaccurately translated as "mind" or "intellect" which is entirely misleading. Eudaimonia doesn't quite mean "happiness," and so on. "Apatheia" is entirely misunderstood if literally translated as "apathy." It is not quite correct to equate the "passions" with "emotions" per se. The possibility for anachronistic errors are at every turn. In the case Stoicism, their motto, "Live according to nature" meant to live according to the whole rather than a resisting ego. Pierre Hadot's study on Marcus Aurelius (The Inner Citadel) explains in detail how the ancient Stoics accomplished this. Of course, the methods are imperfect, but empiricism, as we understand the term today, was a foreign concept to them. A lot of this is due to Hadot's painstaking philological work, because scholars for centuries superimposed their own notions of "reason" anachronistically. It is through this anachronistic lens that Marcus Aurelius was thought of as morbid or gloomy. The Meditations was never a book of philosophy intended for public reading, nor was it a personal journal. Framed as such, there is much in the Meditations that simply don't make sense. Rather it was a "workbook" intended, through the act of writing, to induce a shift toward a cosmic perspective and a loosening of apprehensions which cause only more anxiety. This may still be an imperfect approach (it certainly has its flaws and isn't always convincing), but it is also a far cry from the kind of arid speculation that later philosopher assumed about the ancient world. It's all very fascinating, though my interests have moved on since then. Here's an all-too-brief overview of Pierre Hadot: http://www.iep.utm.edu/hadot/

I need to re-acquaint myself with the Ames & Hall translation -- it was for this reason that you quoted, Yueya, that I liked their translation and commentary -- dao as a verb, not a noun. I find western philosophy problematic in that it almost inevitably tends toward essentialism. Certainly in that sense, Whitehead was right to say that all western philosophy was a footnote to Plato. It is difficult to shake off because it is so embedded in western culture and we are generally unaware of it. Grammar is a way of carving up the world, and without having an awareness of this, we believe "time" and "being" are separate. Essentialism rests upon this assumption that things (including ourselves) "exist" in a fixed way, and temporality is just something extra. From this metaphysical assumption, a series of errors are compounded. The problem isn't grammar per se, but that we remain unaware that our native grammar provides only one possible perspective among many. From the broader metaphysical perspective no thing "is" except in a provisional and imperfect sense -- including dao. The Dao De Jing (expressed in a more fluid grammar, incidentally), acknowledges temporality rather than fleeing it. I do think Ames & Hall are closer to understanding dao as a temporal process (a verb!) rather than a metaphysical substance underlying physical reality. Thought as a substance, Daoism becomes Platonized, and as such, it misses what is truly unique about Daoism -- it includes time in its metaphysics rather than attempting to sever itself from it.

There's nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to the typical American preoccupation with conspiracy theories: Richard Hofstadter: The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Yeah, I just left those with brackets [ _ ] -- I could probably track them down on the internet and copy and paste them, but I don't have them ready at hand, manually typing the text in. (short version: I'm lazy!)

Also to add, regarding Red Pine's comments on modern scholars all-too-neat separation of "philosophical" and "religious" Daoism... The word "philosophy", as understood in the west, has taken on more narrow connotations over the centuries. Pierre Hadot's groundbreaking scholarship points to Greco-Roman philosophia as something practiced -- philosophical discourse in conjunction with what he calls "spiritual exercises." One did not have to write or teach to be a philosopher in the Hellenistic world-- one's deliberate way of life is what determined this designation. In other words, the schools of Pythagoreans, Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Pyrrhonian Skeptics were practiced-- something foreign to our modern day notion of "philosophy" (the Existentialists came close to reproducing the spirit of the Greco-Romans). Ancient philosophia was not "philosophy" in the modern sense, nor was it exactly "religion." It lay somewhere in between. Our concepts have gotten more rigid -- but how did this change occur in western thought? With the rise of Christianity, the Church did not completely eliminate all its "competition" but utilized it for developing their own theological concepts. Christian theology as we know it today could not have existed without Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Even Tertullian (!) admired Seneca, and there were letters circulating which claimed to be between Seneca and Paul of Tarsus. Epictetus' discourses were read widely in monasteries for centuries. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is more stoic in spirit than Christian -- and was one of the most widely read books in the Middle Ages. But the role that the ancient philosophia was altered to suit the theological needs of the Church, hence the epithet "handmaiden of theology." Later, by the Renaissance, for a variety of reasons, a newer philosophy began to emerge which was not necessarily "Christian" and asserted a greater independence from the Church over time. But the nature of philosophy had become conditioned over all the centuries of Christian domestication: it became more abstract, more intellectual -- it was not something "practiced" as the Stoics, Epicureans, etc. understood philosophia. And this brings us to the modern day assumptions of what the word "philosophy" entails. The division between "philosophy" and "religion" is so much more inflexible than in the Greco-Roman world that "true" Daoism in the eyes of western scholarship is either originally a philosophy or a religion. These categories are too coarse. Westerners overvalue abstract consistency over messy concrete reality, but such consistency won't be found in ancient China in any uniform way. Daoism has more varieties than what the modern-day pigeonholes of "philosophy OR religion" allow.

Yueya, I'd like to contribute a little bit of information here as well, if you don’t mind. This regards the possible etymological origins of the word dao itself and its relation to nature, specifically in terms of lunar cycles. This is from an introduction by Red Pine (aka Bill Porter). ~ ~ ~ The Taoteching is at heart a simple book. Written at the end of the sixth century B.C. by a man called Lao-tzu, it’s a vision of what our lives would be like if we were more like the dark, new moon. Lao-tzu teaches us that the dark can always become light and contains within itself the potential for growth, and long life, while the light can only become dark and brings with it decay and early death. Lao-tzu chose long life. Thus, he chose the dark. The word that Lao-tzu chose to represent this vision was Tao, [ _ ]. But tao means “road” or “way” and doesn’t appear to have anything to do with darkness. The character [tao] is made up of two graphs: [ _ ] (head) and [ _ ] (go). To make sense of how the character came to be constructed, early Chinese philologists concluded that “head” must mean the start of something and that the two graphs together show someone starting on a trip. But I find the explanation of a modern scholar of comparative religion, Ti Er-wei, more convincing. Professor Tu says the “head” in the character tao is the face of the moon. And the meaning “road” comes from watching this disembodied face as it moves across the sky. Professor Tu also notes that tao shares a common linguistic heritage with words that mean “moon” or “new moon” in other cultures: Tibetans call the moon da-ua; the Miao, who now live in southwest China but who lived in the same state as Lao-tzu when he was alive, call it tao-tie; the ancient Egyptians thoth. Tu Er-wei could have added dar-sha, which means “new moon” in Sanskrit. However, the heart of Tu’s thesis is not linguistic but textual, and based on references within the Taoteching. Lao-tzu says the Tao is between Heaven and Earth it’s Heaven’s Gate, it’s empty but inexhaustible, it doesn’t die, it waxes and wanes, it’s distant and dark, it doesn’t try to be full, it’s the light that doesn’t blind, it has thirty spokes and two thirteen-day (visible) phases, it can be strung like a bow or expand and contract like a bellows, it moves the other way (relative to the sun, it appears/rises later and later), it’s the great image, the hidden immortal, the crescent soul, the dark union, the dark womb, the dark beyond dark. If this isn’t the moon, what is it? Tu Er-wei has, I think, uncovered a deep and primitive layer of the Taoteching that has escaped the attention of other scholars. Of course, we cannot say for certain that Lao-tzu was consciously aware of the Tao’s association with the moon. But we have his images, and they are too often lunar to dismiss as accidental. In associating the Tao with the moon, Lao-tzu was not alone. The symbol Taoists have used since ancient times to represent the Tao, [Yin-Yang symbol], shows the two cojoined phases of the moon. And how could they ignore such an obvious connection between its cycle of change and our own? Every month we watch the moon grow from nothing to a luminous disc that scatters the stars and pulls the tides within us all. The oceans feel it. The earth feels it. Plants and animals feel it. Humans feel it, though it is women who seem to be most aware of it. In the Huangti Neiching, or Yellow Emperor’s Internal Book of Medicine, Ch’i Po explained this to the Yellow Emperor, “When the moon begins to grow, blood and breath begin to surge. When the moon is completely full, blood and breath are at their fullest, tendons and muscles are at their strongest. When the moon is completely empty, tendons and muscles are at their weakest” (8.26). The advance of civilization has separated us from this easy lunar awareness. We call people affected by the moon “lunatics,” making clear our disdain for its power. Lao-tzu redirects our vision to this ancient mirror. But instead of pointing to its light, he points to its darkness. Every month the moon effortlessly shows us that something comes from nothing. Lao-tzu asks us to emulate this aspect of the moon — not the full moon, which is destined to wane, but the new moon, which holds the promise of rebirth. And while he has us gazing at the moon’s dark mirror, he asks why we don’t live longer than we do. After all, don’t we share the same nature as the moon? And isn’t the moon immortal? Scholars tend to ignore Lao-tzu’s emphasis on darkness and immortality, for it takes the book beyond the reach of academic analysis. For scholars, darkness is just a more poetic way of describing the mysterious. And immortality is a euphemism for long life. Over the years, they have distilled what they call Lao-tzu’s “Taoist philosophy” from the later developments of “Taoist religion.” They call the Taoteching a treatise on political or military strategy, or they see it as primitive scientific naturalism or utopianism — or just a bunch of sayings. But trying to force the Taoteching into the categories of modern discourse not only distorts the Taoteching but also treats the traditions that later Taoists have associated with the text as irrelevant and misguided. Meanwhile, the Taoteching continues to inspire millions of Chinese as a spiritual text… [from Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching, translated by Red Pine, with selected commentaries from the past 2,000 years] ~ ~ ~ …I’d like to add that in light of this connection between lunar cycles, menstrual cycles and female fertility, that much of the feminine imagery is used in the Dao De Jing. It seems to suggest all the more that proto-Daoism, however it came about, arose out of an earlier matriarchal culture. The modern day Mosuo in eastern China could be one of the few surviving offshoots of this earlier Chinese culture.

The biological component is there in the beginning, to be sure -- but at least in some cases, a greater depth can be reached (over several years of growth) where the physical aspect plays a much lesser role. Human beings are more than walking and talking sex organs, if a couple is willing to explore further in conversation, shared values, experiences and memories, etc. That's where the real bonding takes place, but few people have the patience and the desire to let that develop -- or they make the wrong choices early in life (rushing marriage, for example). Without that deeper bonding, all the wild sex in the world won't keep a couple together.

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THE ESQUIMOS HAVE NO WORD FOR "WAR" Trying to explain it to them Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene. Their houses, like white bowls, Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes Of night and day. They listen politely, and stride away With spears and sleds and barking dogs To hunt for food. The women wait Chewing on skins or singing songs, Knowing that they have hours to spend, That the luck of the hunter is often late. Later, by fires and boiling bones In steaming kettles, they welcome me, Far kin, pale brother, To share what they have in a hungry time In a difficult land. While I talk on Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies, Shifting alliances, airplanes, power, They chew their bones, and smile at one another. ~ Mary Oliver

Even FOX thinks McCrory misguided. The only one obsessed with transgender people is him. He just can't help himself.