Taomeow

Most humans translate stuff from the Chinese even worse, and most taoist compilations fare worse than most texts and often contain inexplicable stuff or sheer nonsense or both. However, while this Mountain might have been an AI glitch or a human glitch, it might also be none of the above and quite meaningful. It is one possible way to render the notion of "Stillness," by using the corresponding trigram Gen, aka Mountain, aka Stillness, which is an acceptable general reference to the practices cultivating same as the foundation from which they are undertaken. Besides,

Curious to hear from folks who have undertaken studying and practicing (and maybe teaching?) any of these methods. I've learned and used some from each category. Within each, I've familiarized myself with most, have given much time and effort to some, undertaken a cursory foray into others, and haven't touched still others. Of course the list, like all lists, could be organized rather differently, expanded, contracted, and refurbished terminology wise. (E.g., there exists a tradition of including most of what's on that map under the broader notion of feng shui, not feng shui as it is known in the West where self-appointed masters sort of rearrange chairs on the deck of the Titanic and call it feng shui, but as a fundamental taoist space-time science underlying all others.) But at a glance, someone interested in taoism (supposedly) might get a very general idea of what it is that taoists actually do (as opposed to what its accidental tourists talk about.) I always give this suggestion to those with budding taoist interests: pick something from an array of what taoists do and start doing it. That's a foot in the door. Limiting one's participation to thinking, reading, writing, talking "about" (and, yes, even "meditating" without a clear idea of "how," "what for" and other technicalities) is a foot jammed in the door that is being shut. Interestingly enough, any one of the methods can be complete, the whole thing is holographic. But to get the whole enchilada, this one thing should become all things to the practitioner. One would have to go deeper and broader, higher and lower, faster and slower, engage expansive and concentrated thinking and no-thinking, throw everything and the kitchen sink at it.

"Cats, beings of many incarnations, bring with them ancestral wisdom and open portals to other dimensions." -- Edgar Cayce

Just got a UPS package from a friend -- some memorabilia which she found in the process of cleaning out a storage space. That storage had decades' worth of accumulated stuff -- first her mom's, then her own. On the outside, the package she mailed looks mighty funky. The thing is, in the process of decluttering she found, among other things, a box of postal stamps from the 1970s and, since they are still valid, decided to put them to good practical use. They are 13-cent stamps and she had to use 110 (one hundred ten) of them to mail a 1lb package. Sort of puts inflation in perspective.

Iboga?? Could you be more specific, please? Far as I know, it's a psychedelic (or rather entheogen) which in the US is both illegal and unavaliable. Where's the place that uses it as a food supplement? I've never heard of such use, though I know quite a bit about its shamanic/psychotherapy aid properties.

I don't think a lion can eat me even once. I normally get along with felines. There's mountain lions reportedly encountered on occasion on hiking trails where I live, so I carry some kitty treats with me, just in case. (And an oversized shirt to spread like wings and look large and intimidating in case kitty treats don't work. And boy can I meow!) Although chances of being eaten by a lion the next time I step out the door are 1:2 if we were to trust standard statistical methods: either it will eat me, or it won't.

I recognize the lion by his claw. The story apparently goes like this. In 1696, Johannes Bernoulli sent a letter to all the major mathematicians in Europe challenging them to solve a mathematical problem. Newton, upon solving it, sent the solution to Bernoulli anonymously. The latter immediately recognized who could have come up with such an elegant solution, and exclaimed -- in Latin of course which was the language of scientific discourse at the time -- Tanquam ex ungue leonem. We recognize the lion by his claw. One of my favorite expressions. There's other ones similar in meaning which I also like, e.g.: To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. -- William Blake To know shit from Shinola. -- American folklore

I have some info about how people with power and money who also happen to be health-conscious (not all of them are) go about improving their odds of dancing on everybody else's graves. Leaving the most so-called "conspiracy" (aka clandestine) stuff out of it (although I could tell some stories...), I'll cite the male nurse who gave me a couple of vitamin and mineral IV infusions during the pandemic (the so-called Myers cocktail). It's a slow drip (taking at least an hour), and he had nothing else to do during that time, so we had nice chats. He told me things about his pandemic employment adventures, and then mentioned that his most steady and significant income was coming from administering various IV goodies to his wealthy private clients. Some of them do this all the time, plus extra stuff as needed to clear up things like hangover or jet lag...

Thank you for heeding my request. The cat picture posted by Nungali was in response to my talking about "politicizing cats" -- an apt example IMO, and funny. I don't think mentioning a politician's name or an image of a cat fashioned as a politician, or a politician's dog, is off limits, but to be on the safe side, I'd take emotional outbursts of sentiments we all have against particular political personalities elsewhere, in compliance yada yada. "do I know who is against exercise?" I believe many old school taoists are. (Taiji is not "exercise," anymore than just learning to live in one's body in a more efficient, smart, physiologically sound, energy-saving fashion overwriting bad "civilized" body use habits and safeguarding it from harm, whether from the outside or from the inside, to the extent possible and to the best of one's ability, is "exercise.") I don't think moderate exercise is harmful though, and I do believe that to keep moving and to prevent or at least postpone as much as possible the loss of our natural ability to move effortlessly in many versatile ways (which we all had growing up), or to have fun in the process or from the process, can't be anything but beneficial. But I am not a believer in obsessive strenuous exercise, and much less in competitive sports, and even less in professional sports as a path to good health and longevity. In fact, I have reasons to believe that the opposite is true.

Once again @old3bob, please take this to your Trump political thread. What @Master Logray and @Taoist Texts brought up and I responded to is not about "megalomanic monstrosity of twisted sickness," it's about the "strange" behavior of non-exercising and what might be the "traditional" rationale behind it. There was already a mod warning in this thread to keep it away from political stuff, and I would like for it to stay here and to keep posting and reading about "stranger things" rather than have it moved to Current Events and wither in its "stranger" capacity.

"I get my exercise serving as pallbearer to my many friends who exercised all their lives" -- Winston Churchill (a fat dude who smoked cigars and drank cognac and lived to be 90. Trump, however, never had a drink in his life, or smoked, so, you never know...)

Or like Biden using this argument in his July debate with Trump: "You have the morals of an alley cat.” It's worth noting that per CNN (!), Biden's dog, Commander Biden, was involved in 11 separate biting incidents at the White House, chomping on officers/Secret Service agents and putting some of them in the hospital. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/politics/commander-biden-biting-incident/index.html I won't comment on the morals of that dog, however, to avoid politicizing dogs too.

It's one of the urban legends about ginseng that probably got repeated here. What is true, however, is that ginseng has been shown (in a few countries that have studied it instead of creating urban legends) to be more efficient in older people than in younger ones. A good dose can boost physical performance in younger people -- e.g. there was an experiment where it was given to soldiers on the march and they were able to march faster and longer before experiencing fatigue -- so, yes, it can be stimulating, but there's no significant effects on the baseline health parameters in young folks. Whereas in older one it acts on the baseline, normalizing some of those parameters long term. To affect jing, however, one would have to have 20+ year old ginseng, whereas younger specimens (which is what you get on the market -- 6 years old tops if you're lucky) are not able to reach the level of jing and act only on qi. Very old people can expect miracles from very old ginseng. Wild 60+ year old panax roots sell at prices exceeding their weight in gold, however... so, not very practical. In Korea, where most of panax is grown these days, people (young and old alike) are in the habit of using it daily, and not worrying about the dose that much. Those who have access to fresh roots munch on them the way we might eat a carrot.

All right, to prevent it from veering political, let me post something really strange and entirely apolitical.* I think a pensively smoking cat should fit the bill. *Nothing is really apolitical though if one looks deeper. E.g. into the history of politicizing smoking. Or cats.

Goji berries have some rare carotenoids that get activated by heat and become more bioavailable. Black sesame seeds aren't to my knowledge an ingredient in herbal teas, they are used differently. As for the rest, there's a lot of Chinese herbs that are pre-treated a certain way (cooked, steeped in wine, etc.) before being used, and some of them come in both forms -- cooked and raw (e.g. rehmannia) and act differently, though most need to be boiled and can't be just eaten. (Try eating coptis -- a powerful natural antibiotic and antiviral -- a broken tooth is guaranteed, it's hard as stone and bitter as sin.)

We are eaten up by nothing. -- Charles Bukowski

It's absolutely government overspending, then overprinting in order to keep overspending, then overspending and overprinting, then overprinting and overspending, and on and on ad nauseam. Everyday people have nothing whatsoever to do with it. The only way to address it would be a government by the people, for the people... which isn't even a pipe dream anymore, it's something out of a different dimension, not connected to ours in any way. If there ever was a wormhole to that dimension, they blew it up.

I think there ought to be a mirror system for the southern hemisphere because the sun is still over your head, not under your feet, in either hemisphere. But whether it exists or not I don't know -- all of taoism happened in the northern hemisphere, so maybe no one bothered with the mirror system. (Except for Wang Liping who specifically traveled to the South Pole to try to figure out what's up with qi down under.) Taoists start separating the sheep from the goats by determining which ones are yang and which ones are yin, take it from there. So, yang is up/hot in relation to yin, yin is down/cold in relation to yang. Fire, which is more yang than any other of the five types of qi ('elements"), is hot -- like the sun which is hot ( and up over our heads) -- like it's hotter in the Northern hemisphere the farther you move South. So, hot=Fire=South. Your down under system is baffling because the sun is still up over your heads and still hot, but the South pole is cold. Perhaps the yin-yang flip occurs at the equator (as it should -- extreme yang flips into yin), so you are truly and verily upside down.

Taoists associate South with the sun -- the ultimate yang direction. The opposite pole, accordingly, is North -- yin direction. Which is why taoist maps always show South on top where the sun is (overhead, not underfoot) whether they map the earth or the human body. (The head is yang/South on top in relation to the feet/North on the bottom.) All of (real) feng shui is organized according to this principle, as well as all organs of the human body. Which makes the human-cosmos relationship palpable and intuitive. It is still not uncommon for a Chinese patient to complain to the doctor that she feels pain and tension "in the southeast of the body." Or for a baffled tourist to get route directions in the street along the lines of, "walk three blocks to the west, turn north, walk a few blocks till you see a side street going northwest, turn there and once you hit the intersection, go southwest, then on the eastern corner you'll find the museum you're looking for."

What you're talking about is the outcome, not of a lack of information but of an an excess of exploitation, poverty, back-breaking work, absence of opportunities brought about by unfair and unjust social conditions, unavailability of education, and keeping the population downtrodden as a matter of policy for millennia of "civilization." In the same era the image you posted depicts, my hard-working and successful great-grandparents, who had seven children but weren't poor or uneducated, had a very different life from what you've described. They lived in a little settlement in Central Ukraine for as many generations as the available records account for. All 7 children got higher education (except for my grandmother, the youngest, who dropped out of med school before graduating when her first child was born, and became a nurse.) Two of the boys went to Heidelberg University in Germany for theirs, one of the girls, to Moscow, and two, to Kiev. Both great-grandparents were killed in the beginning of WWII aged 87 and 91 respectively, and were never sick of feeble. My grandmother lived to be 93, and all her siblings who didn't perish in wars and revolutions (the two Heidelberg brothers did) also died in their 90s, in most cases of the first-ever illness of their lives. When one of her brothers contracted herpes at the age of 89 and went to see a doctor for the first time, the doctor told him that his biological age was about 50. Education wise -- well, a pediatrician, an artist painting decorations for the Bolshoi Theater, an accountant, etc., and as for no new ideas... no new books to read... no new stories... of everything you mentioned, nothing applies. And like I said, the reason it doesn't apply is, they were not poor. (Not until the revolution that is, afterwards, yes, very poor for quite a while. But those who survived "history" bounced back.) In the US, 1 in 32 children now has autism. In CA, it's 1 in 22. 50% of the population (sic! -- half the country) are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. I'll spare you the rest of the statistics -- of cancer, cardiovascular, neuromuscular, immune disorders, infertility, psychiatric and mood disorders (25% of all women are on antidepressants) -- but those are absolutely horrifying. When my grandmother described to me how they would make homemade ice cream for the whole family on Saturdays (fresh cream from the neighbor's cow and wild strawberries from a nearby forest), or how she had 17 anthrax patients under her care and every single one of them survived, or how... well, I don't think they had it all that bad.

The thing is, the amount of data to process is always, at all times, infinite. It's a matter of how vital a particular type of data is for the species' surviving and thriving. Ignoring (and forgetting, let's not forget) what's irrelevant is part of intelligence, as well as learning to discern meaningful data within huge amounts of random "information" and differentiate it from irrelevant "white noise." who have over 50 words for "snow" of different types -- they now assert that "200 words" 19th century explorers offered is a myth, but over 50 have indeed been documented today, and whether those explorers lied or the other 150 words have been lost since it was true is debatable. I have reasons to believe it's the latter. In any event, over 50 is still plenty and it means treating "snow of different types" as information when it becomes necessary. In Russian, there's 107 words for things "snow and ice," of which I personally could probably name about two dozen or more off the top of my head. But this is not vital information for me since I'm not a a reindeer herder surviving an extremely harsh environment due to, among other things, treating various types of snow and ice as vital and meaningful data to process. And I doubt a native of SoCal would name nearly as many in English unless they're a linguist with a special interest in the subject -- though I also doubt there are as many words for "snow and ice" in English. My point is, the whole world, the whole existence, is data, is information -- and a huge chunk of intelligence is not "the more the merrier" approach to it but, rather, the opposite. Pick and choose what is and what isn't worth processing out of your environment and its events and patterns, "make it your own," build it into the very neural net of your brain and the physiology of your body -- and hey presto, you're intelligent. Unfortunately, an onslaught of modern devices, phone centered childhoods especially, keep shrinking this ability in humans. Information addiction is like any other -- little ratlings who were given sugar water growing up become addicted to sugar and their whole lives become about access to sugar. But they fail all intelligence tests against controls who weren't given this addiction.