Taomeow

Yeah, strong cultivators are a separate story. My teacher never failed to give me a boost of qi by his sheer presence. It's as though no matter how you feel, no matter where your baseline is, after spending some time around this person you invariably feel better.

Definitely. And just like with places, or even more so, it's not one kind of force, it's different kinds of power. The most obvious is sexual attractiveness which in some people reaches its peak at a certain age, stays there for a certain while, and then begins to ebb. It is the force some modern folks try to cling to (and some make fools of themselves in the process) -- whereas it's meant to work like that line in the I Ching: "It flares up, dies down, gets thrown away." Other forces are waiting in line to take its place. Motherly/fatherly energy -- powerfully attractive when it's there, and a talented teacher (or even a general whom soldiers see as a "father figure" on occasion) has it. Powerful but unscrupulous leaders exploit it to the max. Then there's forces that make someone talented, or even a genius -- also a magnet, although a more selective kind, or rather, the kind that can pull on one end and push on the other. And so on.

Because we are human? I believe every live creature sees (hears, smells, feels tactile impressions, etc.) the world where it can exist, or else it wouldn't exist. We don't have echolocation of whales and dolphins among our sensory abilities because we don't live in the ocean. (Maybe we did when we did, but lost it when we crawled onto the shore... if that's how it really happened.) Nor of bats because we don't fly in the dark. (That's why we can occasionally bump into trees in the dark, so at night we prefer to sleep.) Or take the trees -- their sensory organs are phenomenal, notably the roots' ability to find nutrients and water deep in the ground (and take in only what they need -- each little rootlet is an advanced biochemical lab!) and their competence in stereometry (or they would lose balance and fall on the ground and on each other's head... try being 380 feet tall like the tallest sequoia in California and standing on one leg for 3,500 years -- you've got to be an expert in, not just stereometry but space and time, no less!) But we don't live like that, so we don't have the ability to see that world. Their world. We don't need it. Methinks we'd be supremely lucky if we could see our world, the real human world, but we've changed it into something I'm not sure we have adequate organs of perception for handling competently. E.g. chemical and electromagnetic pollution -- we may not be feeling what we really need to feel in order to have a chance for long term (or even moderate term) survival. We now have an environment for which we don't have organs to adequately process it and competently respond to. If we survive, we may develop them. But far as I know, our technological "advances" work tens of thousands of times faster than evolution does. Too damn fast to catch up with on the level of adequate perceptions, let alone organs for handling those tasks.

Visions were the last thing on my mind. I was talking a taoist science that gives real expanded perceptions to those who've studied it, not unlike the way the once-theoretical animalcules (the old way to say microorganisms) became real only to those who saw them through the microscope -- after it was invented. The Wood phase of wuxing (if that's what you thought was "visions" when I mentioned it) is, likewise, something you can perceive by way of expanding your perceptions and, yes, even with the help of an instrument (called luopan), albeit a very different one from a microscope. The microscope gives a "vision" to your eyes, while wuxing theory gives eyes to your "vision" of the world...

Live things develop senses that are contingent on the environment and geared toward survival. Every species' sensory organs (and brains, in those who possess them) heavily edit what can be perceived toward survival and thriving advantages. What can only hinder those processes is not included. The tree is fully transparent and penetrable to a neutrino, so neutrino based life forms might be flying right through it as we speak and not even noticing there's a tree. It's not only not real to them -- it doesn't exist. But a practicing carbon-based philosopher will wind up with a bump on his forehead if he tries to follow suit. Which is why most people learned to perceive trees as real -- doing the opposite is not conductive to surviving and thriving of the species no matter what its philosophical leanings. So the question one must ask very quickly before discussing things real vs. not real in any context ought to be, "to whom?" Most original taoist schools have somehow arrived at this consensus -- to perceive reality from the POV of the actual human, not some mental construct. To set goals that are primarily human. To expand them, learning as much as possible about what's possible for a human. And so on. This allows for all kinds of trees -- physical, metaphysical (wuxing Wood phase), useful and useless (as in Zhuangzi's parable), beautiful (artistic perceptions) and cultivational (as in tree qigong/neigong) and so on without trying to separate them into "real" and "not real." Real to whom? To me, wuxing Wood phase is real because I've developed my human perceptions toward perceiving it, by the apparatus available to me -- senses, study, intellect, observation, integration, "grokking," etc.. But ask a "modern scientist" and you get "old wives' tales," "Chinese superstitions" and "unscientific pseudoscience." That's because they don't have the organs of perception to perceive it as real. And so, to them, it isn't. By the same token, an Advaita sage might tell me trees are maya, illusion. To whom? ???

A daoist meditation goes something like, Know how to expand the acorn into a mighty oak tree, but seek to know how to contract the mighty oak tree back into an acorn.

I had that street salad many times when I used to travel to Tijuana. The vendor would mix a large number of seasonal fruits and vegetables for each (with a huge machete and at an impressive cutting speed!) and I said yes to everything -- salt, freshly squeezed lime juice and killer chile flakes but no to jicama (it tasted like raw potato to me, so, no. Was I wrong?) The devil's name for this particular task was Richard Nixon, as explained in "Fiat Food" by Matthew Lysiak -- inflation is something that was applied to food to the same (or greater) extent as money, it was taken off the gold standard, and the FDA-pushed "food pyramid" was used as one of the instruments. The gold standard is meat, fish, butter, cheese, animal fats, eggs. Meow!

When I visited China, I found it amazing (and somewhat amusing) that in the restaurants they occasionally listed health benefits of various dishes on the menu -- this soup nourishes the Kidneys, this congee supports the Liver, and so on. Many of those places (serving the locals, not the tourists) had an impressive variety of dishes to choose from, but you couldn't find a green salad anywhere. Sometimes (rarely) there was this cucumber salad (just a peeled, sliced cucumber with a little vinegar), plus I've seen people eat cucumbers in the street straight up, the way we might eat an apple, they consider them fruits rather than vegetables. My TCM doctor of long ago here in the US used to ask me about my weekend at my Monday appointments, and at the time, a typical for me answer would be, "we went to a Japanese restaurant." (We lived next door to a local Japanese community so there was an outcropping of good ones, and I am a big fan of Japanese food). "You ate raw food?" he always doublechecked. "Yuck!"

Boredom is a prison, a solitary confinement that can lock you up anytime, anywhere -- at a cheerful and seemingly eventful party, while working on a world-changing technology, while interrogating criminals, while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. To say nothing of sitting in traffic, studying for the test in a subject of no interest to you, flipping hamburgers, sewing countless t-shirts or manning the assembly line. Boredom can have the face of your wife or husband, of your parents, co-workers, teachers, TV presenters and politicians with their same old same old, the face of your life. Being sick is boring, being poor and unable to afford anything is boring, being filthy rich and able to afford anything gets excruciatingly boring fast, being smart bores you with your own wits that turn into a boring routine, being dumb is boring but you don't know why 'cause you're too dumb to understand. Civilization is boring.

Verbiage aside, the main function of most religions in most societies most of the time has been to dissuade people from challenging the dominant narrative of the moment, from asking sacrilegious (i.e. upsetting) questions and having unsanctioned opinions. To wit, compliance enforcement toward power/resources reallocation and/or preservation -- with a little help from indoctrination, crusades, witch hunts, excommunications, ostracisms, and other tried and true religious practices (as opposed to theories). That's why they don't need us to be as traditionally religious today as they used to. New times, new verbiage, new paragons of righteousness and new sinners, new virtues and transgressions, new commandments and sacraments, new beneficiaries and scapegoats... ...but all of it is so familiar I sometimes feel as though I've lived for thousands of years and haven't seen an iota of genuine change of the human condition. New religions are called something else, as are new gods and new demons, and they do shuffle and change them much faster than they used to. But there's never any shortage of worshippers of whatever they throw at us to see if it sticks. It does. And in case it doesn't, the Holy Inquisition is never idle.

No, I don't think it makes you "one of them." Just not buying every nonsense story and the kitchen sink is not enough. If you were one of the folks who really do cover up real conspiracies, you'd be able to show me the money. Example: This huge yacht which is currently blocking the view of our harbor (cost $250 million, made for just 12 passengers and a crew of 30) belongs to a German-American who made his fortune as a foreign supplier of food and fuel to American troops during the war in Afghanistan. In 2014 a whistleblower uncovered fraud and alerted the Justice Department. The company was asked to give some of the stolen money back (and coughed up a bit under half a billion dollars) and to refrain from further contracts with the Pentagon for 5 years (! -- after that, carry on) in exchange for no prosecution. I don't think it was enough of a punishment, but at least they gave some money back. I wonder to whom though... Definitely not the soldiers who were getting crappy food (I know exactly how crappy from a woman who served in Afghanistan at the time), nor the taxpayers who paid for it all plus a 30% surcharge for every can of Coca-Cola and every bite of the crappy food supplied by the yachtsman.

We're on the same page.

Didn't know that, but then, I never made it through that book. I've lowered my criteria ever since audiobooks became prominent, having listened to more trash since 2020 than I've ever read in all of my previous life (a great tool for when you are too lazy or too tired to meditate but want your own mind to shut up and take a nap), but Dan Brown never made it through my remaining trash filters. I lowered the bar enough for The Game of Thrones etc., but the buck has to stop somewhere.

In terms of Google alternatives, there aren't many and they aren't perfect and are more or less going down the same path, though not all have arrived yet. I used to go to DuckDuckGo but it's turned into something nearly indistinguishable from Google. You can still fish out some useful stuff from MetaGer. Even ChatGPT can deliver if you are sly enough in the way you formulate your inquiry -- e.g. instead of "alternative treatments for _XYZ_" ask it "what debunked alternative treatments for _XYX_ can you find?" Other than that, it's still good old books, and original scientific articles, and a closer look at who paid for them, and independent journalists, and throwing your net far and wide, and knowing other languages... what not. E.g. on the subject of Christianity, the book that I found pretty educational once upon a time was "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. First published in England in the 1980s I think. The idea someone mentioned here that Mary was the original Jesus probably comes from that book, which was impressively researched as I recall... though I'm no historian (especially of Christianity) and wouldn't place any bets.

Once upon a time Google used to be where you went when you wanted to expand your knowledge on whatever subject, but those days are long gone. Now it's where you go to find out what kind of knowledge might keep you out of trouble with the presiding god of the moment, the Supreme Idiot Maker.

Am I to be offended or flattered?

I'm a taoist. The Great Mother, of course. And what did she engineer those scoundrels for one might ask? She sort of didn't, she merely allowed for their appearance because she engineered Yi, irregular stochastic variations and changes. Which physicists have a vague idea about being one of the fundamental blocks of creation having something to do with probability theory and the uncertainty principle. 20% uncertainty is engineered into everything. Why did she not make it all good and regular and precise and predictable? Because it's a live thing, not a machine. An eternal ever-predictable machine would have been the most boring arrangement one could imagine. Live things can't be fully predictable, one has to allow for irregularity, variety, surprise, perhaps even miracles... probabilistic events, processes and entities. So in order for it all to be alive, the Great Mother was bound to allow for some really bad apples among her countless children. Some call them demiurges. I suspect they might be the engineers responsible for our very own project... ahem... world. Just our stochastic luck I guess.

I'm not a fan of "Dune," I found the book rather tastelessly pompous and essentially boring, the movie version even more so (I only watched the first of the new ones), but there was this one concept therein, a pearl in a box of pearl barley, regarding Bene Gesserit. A powerful ancient order busying itself with political, genetic and religious engineering of planets toward their own agenda. The fact that in the book it was a "sisterhood" instead of the "brotherhood" it's always been in real life is a fly in the ointment, but other than that, this concept, of something akin to Bene Gesserit as the actual shaping force behind our planet's predicament, makes more sense to me than all religions combined.

I didn't know that. So if I were to show up and recite La Ilaha Illallah Muhammadur Rasool Allah, no one would bat an eye? Even though it means there's no god but Allah (and Muhammad is his prophet)? There's currently 2 billion people on Earth who believe that and only that. What happened to their innate knowledge about the other guy?

I seem to recall that many versions of the Christian doctrine were based on the assumption that "heathen" and "barbarians" don't have a soul, and that they get a chance to acquire one if they accept Jesus as their savior. Some went farther -- I'm not someone who has all the references on hand for all occasions (to my chagrin), but I read a medieval treatise titled "Is Woman Human?" with my own eyes, and it proved with multiple biblical quotes that she isn't, and therefore, while "all humans" have a soul, this only implies all male humans. Also, if these things are innate knowledge, why study them in a Sunday school? I was born in a country where for 70 years atheism was the state policy, so I first had a chance to read the Bible (smuggled from the US) when I was 20 or so, and most of it was news to me. Perhaps because I'm a woman and didn't have the innate knowledge due to gender-specific lack of a soul?

Parthenogenesis, aka asexual reproduction, aka immaculate conception, does occur in nature, although seldom in vertebrate species. In humans (as well as other primates), it also happens on occasion, but in every single case results in a tumor rather than a god. Theoretically it might be possible to accomplish via genetic manipulations, except the resulting organism could only be female and the exact replica of the mother at that. If some geneticists from some "kingdom not of this earth" were to induce it in virgin Mary, the child would have been a little virgin Mary all over again. Although if all the genetic material from a man's spermatozoon were to be implanted artificially into Mary's egg, perhaps that would also count as immaculate conception, since artificial insemination happens outside the sinful act. In which case the baby had a 50% chance of being male. I have long suspected some extraneous genetic shenanigans with our species -- not because of Christian stories, chiefly for other reasons, but some of those stories do start making some sense if you allow for this possibility -- and only in this case.

Thanks for a blast from the past. I don't think I was making any statements about emptiness and consciousness. I was talking of observers taken out of the equation as a matter of routine operations of what we are told is scientific objectivity. What I seem to remember having in mind was something not as grand as the cosmic mind but, rather, things very mundane that we accept as objective scientific approach. Not the elephant in the room but a herd of elephants, in fact. The non-independence and non-freedom of any "objective observer" from all things subjective. From their very own personality traits ("gotta prove it to mom and dad and the world that I'm important, that I'm worthy") to hopes of tenure or grants given or not given based on how well the results dovetail with the granting party's agenda, to the general reluctance to rock the boat that carries the "observer"-- hierarchy, career, non-alienating the peers whose careers and incomes might depend on no "independent objective observer" rocking the boat, down to the price of publishing one's scientific observations when not sponsored/desired by anything big and powerful and incorporated (a minimum of $5,000 out of the observer's pocket these days, per my scientist friends) and ad infinitum.

Nice. I was just thinking today -- civilization is something that runs on lies as its main fuel. What occasioned the thought was cooking some fish fillets for dinner and marveling, for the ten thousandth time, how fish and meat are invariably injected with water so each cut appears twice the actual size, and how they shrink to half the size or less once you throw them on the frying pan. I know for a fact this doesn't happen to either if it hasn't been inflated this way, and paying an arm and a leg at a HFS doesn't really help. And the train of thought took me to how it's really everything -- everything contains a generous portion of lies, you can't buy, beg, borrow or steal anything without this ingredient -- often the main ingredient -- and often enough the only one. Yes, it's probably possible to tell from the handwriting if they're writing untruths. I wouldn't be able to (I get plenty of other clues though, too many, from multiple other sources.) But there's things I could tell from the handwriting that would give me pause if I was the employer making that decision -- e.g. vanity, self-importance, pent up anger, a giver-upper attitude (or rather "giver-downer" -- each line tends to slide downward at its end), poor planner, miser, careless spender... All those lessons they taught you in that course might be wasted on a good graphologist -- but our resumes are printed, so, no worries.

I read a somewhat different version of the story, as told by one of my all-time favorite authors, Fazil Iskander, an Abkhazian Russian writer whose best (IMO) stories are true stories from his childhood and youth in his native village in the mountains of Abkhazia. I read Zana's story a long time ago and details escape me, but she was, according to the elders in Tkhina who remembered her well, very sexually uninhibited and typically initiated sex with men rather than being forced into it. That sort of makes some sense, considering she was two meters tall, extremely muscular, and strong like a horse. The story was actually funny, I'll try to find and re-read it.