Taomeow

Altai, Siberia

To Hinduism, originally. Then to Buddhism that inherited and reinterpreted it. And it is no different from any other Indo-European doctrine concerned with the matter and includes (though is not limited to) the one you proclaimed, but is different from the taoist one. That was my whole point. I sometimes think I should abandon written word altogether, given the peculiarities of what passes for reading comprehension skills in my contemporaries. I don't even know how they work in this shape and form exactly, but they render written communication mighty pointless. I make a point, and then someone notices a key word (hooray! Key word!) and turns my point 180 degrees around, apparently honestly believing that the context in which I used it doesn't exist because nothing but the key word was noticed. And then a dictionary definition (or a scriptures rendition) of that word is mirrored back to me in a most baffling manner. I said "this concept is not taoist" and the argument against this assertion goes, "this concept is more buddhist than taoist." I should get out less.

dupa

Methinks human mind, as well as human jing, qi, and shen, have been hijacked. I even remember when and how it happened to me, in stages. An example: stage 168, discovering that people cheat and lie toward creating an unreality of their choosing, the kind that they believe gives them a personal advantage. I discovered it at the age of 4 playing hopscotch with other girls in the neighborhood. I saw one of them move the marker inconspicuously and expertly with her foot to a "correct" square after landing it in an incorrect one, and then vehemently deny it and accuse me of lying when I pointed it out. Then another one did it when an opportunity presented itself. Then I realized they all did it when an opportunity presented itself. I realized I was at that point the only player who played by the rules, and playing by the rules meant being at a great disadvantage. Everybody cheated. It made no sense to me for the longest time. What's the point of playing if you don't want to find out where you really stand in the game? Yet the bogus victory in the unreal world was sought by everybody instead. I had a strong sense of reality, it was the only thing that mattered -- and lying and cheating felt like an incomprehensible wanton destruction of the only thing that mattered. Another example: stage 175, at the same age, discovering that I can't resist this kind of pressure. One of my best friends wanted us to steal some items. I refused, she told me she wouldn't be friends with me anymore if I don't participate. She rationalized the act and made it the right thing to do, and my refusing to participate, a kind of unforgivable betrayal. She was so adamant, so passionate, that I wound up agreeing. We stole those items (some pieces of very cheap plastic costume jewelry), but the next day in kindergarten the teacher asked me where I got that plastic brooch and I said, "I stole it from such and such yesterday," because stealing under pressure was one thing, but lying to cover it up was a skill I hadn't developed yet. And then revelation number 176 followed: there was no explaining to my parents how it happened, they didn't care about the origin of the transgression, they didn't want to help me figure out how exactly I should have extricated myself from the complicated situation that led to the crime, they only wanted to punish, and punish excessively, which led to revelation number 177: people have anger inside that sits in ambush waiting for an opportunity to be discharged at someone weaker. And so on. Neuroscience has determined that the human brain is 95% complete by age 5, and 95% of all it will ever learn has already been learned. Draw your own conclusions...

Laozi and Zhuangzi were a very late addition to taoism and poetic rather than scientific at that. I've enjoyed reading both but this didn't make me a laoist, I'm a taoist, and a taoist has a helluva lot more to learn and, most importantly, practice. I couldn't possibly find the time or incentive to clog my brain with every line from every book in the Taoist Canon, there's 1,200 of them and TTC is not the first, albeit not the worst. So I had to make sure I got the foundational fundamentals right, and you do't go to poetic mass-appeal sources for that. If you want to know how taoist sciences arrived at simultaneous arising, you need to go much farther back, to the founder of taoism, Fuxi, and his Hetu revelation. To the shaman-king Yu the Great and his Luoshu discovery. To King Wen and the Duke of Zhou and the construction of the I Ching as the tool of cognition that is used as such to this day (including by me) based on the fundamental concept of simultaneous arising. If you used yarrow stalks even once or threw the three coins six times even once, you were practically applying this concept to solve your personal problems and get answers to your personal quests. If you did it several thousand times over the course of a couple decades, you'd notice simultaneous arising. Guess you never did. Guess you never experienced simultaneous arising in taiji either, never felt qi flowing up your spine from your mingmen simultaneously with sinking it into your LDT (you can't do it in sequence, you can't have this as a cause-effect pair, only as a simultaneously arising pair, aka unity.) I guess you never studied classical spacetime (Xuan Kong) feng shui and didn't observe the co-creating processes in Chinese medicine, which at its best can diagnose you with a damp basement and clogged plumbing in your house based on your pulse, but trace both -- your basement/plumbing problems and your heart/stomach problems not to one causing the other but to both being a manifestation of a simultaneous Fire deficiency-Earth excess arising codependently in your bazi chart. In other words... ...in other words, you haven't invested time, effort and practice into obtaining the tools necessary for this conversation to have any meaning beyond your "I think so therefore it is so" stance. If you need to be right above all, I can live with that. Yes, you're right. Not about anything in particular, but about your "this response got you nowhere" to me. As would any other. It's a good thing I don't need to convince you of anything. (Sip of coffee, shrug, sip.)

Man, you should go out more often. Six thousand years of the taoist tradition hold fast to this concept, but you had to Indo-European-bomb the thread about "tao in the human world" with the Hindu-Vedic-originating competing concept, Pratītyasamutpāda, "dependent arising" -- your "cause and effect" doctrine at its ideologically motivated root. Ideologically motivated because without this doctrine you can't have karmic punishment, heaven/nirvana for the pious/obedient and hell /samsara for the sinners/heretics/dissidents. In other words, it's a major tool of control of the masses, not a "pure" philosophy. An anarchist who subscribes to Pratītyasamutpāda is an oxymoron.

In the immortal words of Krusty the Clown, "This, I don't need."

Right on -- and I wrote my response to Marblehead without seeing yours, did the word "polarity" arise simultaneously in our minds?

My friend, Laozi didn't teach kindergarten arithmetics, he taught the dynamics of the tao, they are not the same. "One yin and one yang are called the tao." They arise simultaneously. As soon as "one" manifests out of "none," it is polarized, it has an up and a down -- simultaneously, a dark and a light -- simultaneously, a heavy and a light -- simultaneously. Not in sequence. Co-dependently. Co-dependent arising is the bread and butter of taoism. Taiji (the "one" born out of wuji), aka yin and yang, are the basic, fundamental case of simultaneous arising. Events that have a sequential cause and effect constitute about 20% of all events in the universe -- that's what free will is for -- the rest is simultaneous arising. When you were born, the stars assumed a certain position in the sky, your birth didn't cause them to do that, nor did they cause you to be born (arguably, but let's simplify for brevity's sake) -- yet both you and the stars of the moment were linked into a unified moment in space, time, or more precisely universal qi, inextricably and simultaneously. The qi of the moment shaped both, and was shaped by both, yes you participated in shaping the universe, but without either causing it or being caused by more than 20% of its overall simultaneously arising antics (that's the maximal percentage, practically of course it was much less than that.) Put those stars in your pipe and smoke them (not hazardous to your health, I promise.)

I waited for someone to notice... 勁 Jìn is a unique way to use resources of the body, mind, and spirit cultivated in internal MA. To develop various jins is like learning to play chess while playing the violin while riding a bicycle on a tightrope attached to your proprioception on one end and to your yi on the other, for lack of a better metaphor. It is, incidentally, not unrelated to jing, with which it gets so inevitably (but of course erroneously) confused so often -- to wit, they can potentiate each other, but only in a gongfu context, in the course of cultivation. A good amount of quality jing can lay down a foundation for developing jins should one undertake such development, and make the task easier. By the same token, working on developing jins (provided one does not go fajin happy and does not use up too much qi in issuing) can translate into conservation, refining, and accumulation of jing. (Of course it goes without saying that neither one is a substance, although certain substances under certain conditions can indicate certain jing dynamics. Many substances under many conditions.) To OP's question about signs of successful jing replenishment: why immortality of course. Immortals, incidentally, don't necessarily look particularly young -- they look the age they choose to look. A few are young-looking, or even look like children or teenagers, but the vast majority look middle-aged or old, or even ancient. Obsession with youthful looks doesn't seem to last an eternity -- at least not for most eternal beings.

.

In taoism, there's this concept of simultaneous arising. Instead of a "because," a cause-effect relationship, or of an "acausal" manifestation (a highbrow misconception to whose shelter physicists and philosophers alike might run when they are unable to discern the cause), it's more like, a certain environment, a particular zeitgeist is conductive to both appearing simultaneously -- not one as the outcome of the other but both as the outcome of "the kind of times we're in."

You mean, what a spectacular display of emotional intelligence?

nincompoopery

Thank you, very interesting! And thank you for pointing out that Dan G. Reid is not to be confused with Daniel P. Reid, a Golden Dawn/Crowley practitioner who writes about things Chinese/taoist from his own perspective...

What Gerard said. As for Eva Wong, "The Shambala Guide to Taoism."

I grew up in a pretty cold climate (you know Russia is famous for it, right?), and as a child/teenager, loved all winter sports and all kinds of winter fun. Nearly all of my spare time in winter was spent outdoors, till bedtime in fact. And in motion, vigorous motion. Even though I was not particularly sturdy and in spring and autumn would often catch colds, sore throats, etc., winter cold was not conductive to these, and I don't remember any slowing-down, lethargic, stiffening-up, or hibernating tendencies until later in life when spending winter days outdoors in motion was no longer possible. Snow in my winter boots, for hours on end, toes in deep freeze (boy did they hurt when you come back home and take the boots and socks off and they start thawing out! -- well, I was willing to pay that price, every day!) Fingers feeling as though an alligator is biting them off one by one. Cheeks, you rub with snow from time to time to restore circulation. I'm talking really violent frost, schools canceled even though the sun is shining and there's no wind and the blanket of snow lies calm, undisturbed by any new precipitation -- the kind of deep freeze that can kill you if you just stand there doing nothing. But I was never doing nothing, so school canceled on account of too-low temperature meant skiing and skating and building snow fortresses and engaging in snowball wars, and so on. Damn... I miss those "winter practices..."

Meanwhile...

Fire Horse... the destroyer of the parents' family according to the birth year beliefs all across Asia. Did it really happen? I have personal reasons to be curious. Of course you don't have to answer if you don't want to.

ЯR

symmetry

I would amend this statement with a definition of what "magic" is to a classical taoist. True taoism is a science. Every science has its theoretical framework and its empirical/experimental work. Taoist sciences are no exception. Magical taoism is the work of a hands-on experimentalist, but it rests on a solid foundation of fundamental theory. The difference between two types of classical practitioners is not unlike that between a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist. The theoretical physicist may require no equipment at all beyond a pen and a piece of paper -- sometimes not even that, even in our Western sciences the greatest discoveries have been made when some water spilled out of a bathtub while Archimedes was taking a bath, or when an apple fell from a tree for Newton to take a bite, or when Mendeleev had a dream, or when Watson and Crick dropped acid. The experimental physicist's equipment is infinitely more complex -- tools which anyone uninitiated would be unable to distinguish from magic include telescopes, lasers, radiation monitors, satellites orbiting the Earth and other planets, humongous particle accelerators and what not. The difference between theoretical taoism and magical taoism is similar. A theorist may know, understand, and discover laws that govern space, time and destiny without stepping out the door. A magician steps out and then some. For the whole field to be efficient, the two must communicate, however. A long time ago, taoists discovered that "peer reviewed" communication may not be as efficient as having both peers under one cranium -- being the theorist and the empiricist, the scientist and the lab mouse wrapped into one. Einstein didn't have any particle accelerators at his disposal, but without him, or someone like him, none would have appeared. Similarly, taoist scientific theory -- qi, yin-yang, wuxing, ganying, bagua, Hetu, Luoshu, I Ching -- made all magical experimentation possible. It's just that taoists are far more likely to "see for themselves" than to "take someone's word for it" whether they engage in theory or practice, and therefore far more likely to engage in both simultaneously. Taoists are the opposite of narrow specialists. They are deep and wide generalists. Depth is not sacrificed to breadth, and vice versa. So I would say that taoism is a scientific theoretical-experimental inquiry into the nature of space, time and destiny -- a unified theory with countless empirical, pragmatic applications. "Magical" is in the eye of the beholder. A taoist knowledgeable in the fundamental theory has no reason to think of anything she does as "supernatural." Taoist magic is not a flight of fancy. It's the experimental part of the scientific process resting on nature's fundamental laws.

Greetings to you too! Stainless steel is not "horrible," far as I know, just not ideal. The dutch-oven pot is indeed better. Mine are of this kind -- strong chip-resistant enamel over cast iron. I bought a vintage German set a few years ago, and was told "they don't make them like that anymore," but I haven't checked, maybe they do. But that's the general idea -- heavy, with high quality enamel, the best you can find, and if you don't bang them around, it's a forever purchase, nothing happens to these pots (unlike cheap/thin enameled ones where the enamel chips if you sneeze around that pot.) Heavy pots are superior for prolonged cooking, everything tastes better, possibly due to the even distribution of heat, and the fact that you can keep the temperature lower. For something like a boiled egg, I have a small stainless steel pot. I also have a heavy duty Chinese stoneware clay pot, and another one for herbs.

It most definitely isn't. His teachers were taoists Zhongli Quan, Lu Dongbin, and Liu Haichan. According to D.T. Suzuki, Chan was a "natural evolution of Buddhism under Taoist conditions." Upon arriving in China, Buddhism was first identified to be "a barbarian variant of taoism," and taoist terminology was used to express Buddhist doctrines in the oldest translations of Buddhist texts, a practice termed "matching the concepts." Buddha himself was regarded as one of the practitioners who managed to attain immortality -- nothing taoism hasn't seen before -- and the practice of mindfulness of the breath, e.g., as a version of qigong/neigong methods, taoism's perennial stomping ground. The influences of Chan on Quanzhen were purely ideological -- the practices remained fully taoist and nothing was borrowed, only the "matching of the concepts" took place, so "nirvana" became "niwan," e.g., but it doesn't mean taoists waited five thousand years for Buddhists to come invent our dantiens for us.