Taomeow

What kind of energy gets discharged into the atmosphere? Also... years and years ago, there were earthquakes too. Always have been. Has anyone ever heard of "earthquake lights" during any earthquake taking place before the past couple decades?

Ah, good.

I'm pretty sensitive in this respect, so I'll name just a few sites, in no particular order: Mt. Elbrus in the Kabardino-Balkaria region of the North Caucasus. Intense influx of strength, vigor, vitality, physical sense of well-being and health. Spent a month there, the effects lasted for a year. Peruvian Amazon, rain forest east of the Andes. Shamanic adventures. Some of the aftereffects are permanent. The first three weeks after the immersion spent largely in worlds having only tangential associations with this one. Wall of Wailing, Jerusalem. Spoke to me saying "I am pain." Made me stand there for an hour or so, processing. Tears. The Colosseum, Rome. Heard the roar of the caged lions and of the crowd, and the moans of the dying gladiators -- a brief time travel episode, auditory only. Trakai Castle, Lithuania. A not-so brief time travel episode, full immersion, medieval.

Well, I was born with fully operational food instincts, very acute senses. And I hated all carbs (but grains especially, in any shape or form), sweets and all dairy for the first 13 years of my life. Some cultures force feed children, or I would never touch any of these. (Yes, I hated ice cream and chocolate too!) All I wanted was 1. meat in small amounts, medium rare, fatty -- a little shish kabob was ideal; 2. raw vegetables, all kinds, and some fruit and berries, in small amounts; 3. to not eat anything on schedule, to wait till I'm hungry -- and it could take a while, the only time I was allowed to decide for myself when I want my next meal, at the age of 5, I didn't want it for three days and might have gone longer but adults lost patience and aborted the experiment. I believe my instincts were spot on, and have done some scientific research into how this could come about, why they weren't suppressed the way they are in most modern humans who rely on anything but their instincts. "Feel great" is no indicator of anything in a modern adult, for one thing there's no frame of reference to compare this "great" with exponentially greater greats that might be expected on a different, never available, regimen; for another, there's so many defense mechanisms interacting and interfering with each other that you can't really tell if you feel great because you eat what you were naturally designed to eat or because you're getting your fix of an addictive food or because you stopped eating what was truly damaging, or because your mind-over-matter powers help you feel great when you eat the way you believe is right. But with children it's different. Most are born addicted to whatever addictive foods mom ate while pregnant; but for some, earlier, phylogenic programs might kick in instead, i.e. instincts may overwrite addictions. So for me, the biggest food authority, to this day, is my 5-year-old self. Wish I had the instincts she had never force fed out of me.

Thanks for noticing. To question number two -- I have been a member of this forum for 12 years. I don't so much "post so much" as "been around long enough." To question number one -- that's a survival mechanism doing its job. I had to figure stuff out to survive. Smart means severely tested and passing the test. I have great compassion for smart people, I know where they're coming from.

Oh, there was abundance everywhere. The first Europeans arriving in what was to become New York saw what a "traffic jam" in Manhattan looked like back then: migrating salmon in the Hudson went so densely side to side that fishing meant gathering -- you just plucked the fish out of the river with your bare hands. I've foraged for hazelnuts in the wild, they don't grow on trees, it's a bush. Nuts have never been a major food source for humans in times of abundance -- again, like with legumes, too many antinutrients, they are great snacks but only in moderation, since they shut down digestive enzymes and inhibit thyroid functions, to name a few adverse effects... They do this protecting themselves from being overeaten, as a vast majority of wild plants do, with various phytochemicals, some toxic, others intricately and expertly regulating their consumption by interfering with digestion, fertility or energy production in species that might be wont to overeat them. "Balance" does not mean "eat everything that can't strike back." Plants can and do. As a biologist put it, "With their toxic phytochemicals, plants proclaim, in a message loud and clear, their eternal hatred of the herbivores." And we were never "gatherer-hunters" in times of abundance. Only in times of scarcity. In times of abundance, we didn't even hunt for small or lean animals -- like I said before, we always went for the biggest, fattest animal in the environment. On the North American continent, e.g., huge (crater sized) fire pits have been discovered and thoroughly described by archeologists, which Native Americans used to roast their bison and buffalo whole, and some of them were in continuous uninterrupted use for 25,000 years! (sic).

WTF is right. A hunter-gatherer "worked" to "make a living" fifteen hours per week, the rest of the time was for play. The work was skill intensive but not labor intensive. No back-breaking or mind-wrecking anything. No soul-extinguishing anything especially. So someone was bound to realize that these skilled creatures naturally forming cooperating group will make a perfect slave force. There's two ways to make a slave. To remove him/her from the sustaining habitat. Or to remove the sustaining habitat from him/her. The first way is fast, simple, amateurish, and local. The second way is long term, sophisticated, professional, and global. Amateurs will keep imitating professionals, of course. "Set it and forget it," as some general (I think) explained what a perfect weapon is like. It only needs to be installed, and then it never stops making war. Grains are bullets in that war we lost. Oh but they hit our opiate receptors so we couldn't possibly resist... not after a perfect match was accomplished between the addictive endogenous painkiller and what will gently, softly perpetuate the addiction for thousands of years to come. I was once told by a biologist that a geneticist studying wheat usually comes to a place where he or she first exclaims, "this is not possible, there's no way in hell nature could do something like this..." ...and then shuts up. And tiptoes away from the inquiry as fast as an iceberg hit by the Titanic does not.

Those are two sides of the same coin -- civilization IS deforestation, and I've come to believe that grain agriculture is the method, deforestation is the goal, not vice versa. Just look at the coins of hundreds of countries depicting bundles of wheat, corn, rice, what not -- all the way to antiquity. They encircle whatever else the coin signifies -- the head of the dominant baboon, the seal (they seal cages so the prisoners don't escape), the spell... However... "The diet of our forest ancestors was a rich mixture of leaves and fruit." The diet of our forest ancestors procured in the periods specified above which coincide with the great ice ages could not possibly rely on what wasn't there. Fruit edible for humans appeared at around the same time grain agriculture did, and were the outcome of manipulation, cultivation, in short sedentary agriculture all over again. Unlike me, the author of the article you quoted must have never set foot in a wild forest. Wild apples you can find there are small, hard, and very bitter. Some are bitter-sour. None are edible. Same deal with pears -- you can break a tooth on a wild pear but aside from an "eeewww" it will yield little else, it's woody, not juicy. The wild grapes are outright poisonous. The wild berries are delicious, but don't grow in Ice Age conditions. Neither do "leaves' of which we are supposed to have consumed "several kilos" daily -- with an 80,000 year break here and there while we waited for them to become available during the next (short) interglacial. My favorite philosopher (nodding to another recent thread, from which he was unjustly absent) is Karl Popper. "Scientific=falsifiable" is all one needs to know about the source of articles as the one above. It's simply made up. A fairy tale... We developed big brains because we ate super high fat animals -- the fattest in the environment, mammoth, whale, seal were our first choices -- 60% of the human brain is made of saturated fat, and that's something not obtainable from "leaves and fruits" even if they were there, which they weren't. Prolonged nursing (several years) is what allowed the human brain to develop its bulk and brawn, and whatever one eats after the first 5-6 years is irrelevant for the size of the brain whose formation is completed by that time. We're not losing brain power to not eating enough leaves. We're losing it to not using them, and letting someone else (who does not strike me as human at all) educate us as to which soy-fluoride formula is best for our young.

I didn't have to talk about meat-eating animals, I could use the example of herbivores who have four stomachs... but I figured since we don't, nor have any capabilities for digesting cellulose unlike e.g., deer and goats and rabbits who have large colonies of cellulose-digesting bacteria in their guts, which is not the case with humans, I thought it's a good idea to use the example of animals with which we share our digestive peculiarities to a greater rather than lesser extent. Lots of qigong may definitely be a factor. Also, one year is something most people can pull off on any diet. There's a reason most of them stop though. Not one reason fits all, but there's usually a reason. And then there's rare individuals who are not harmed by any diet for reasons I would like to know but nobody does. There's a guy who ate his car, e.g., little by little, grinding parts of it into powder and consuming it, metal and glass and rubber and plastic, with battery acid for the dressing. True story.

Excellent question, and I would encourage everyone considering a raw diet to get that answer -- it may help avoid damaging their health and muddling their cognitive powers with a logical fallacy. Animals have digestive systems that "cook" their food inside their bodies which we humans don't have. Why we are so different is a separate question, and I tend toward a very sad hypothesis that might explain it, but for now let's stick to the facts. Not hypothetically but factually, animals are far, far better equipped to eat their food raw than we are. E.g., the stomachs of cats and dogs produce hydrochloric acid in the amounts (per lb) far exceeding what we produce, and far more concentrated -- 10 times more concentrated than that of humans in dogs, even higher concentrations in cats, even higher in wild felines. This lets them dissolve not just meat but even bones inside their bodies. If you want to observe for yourself how that works, you can do a little experiment. Purchase some HCl of the concentration a cat's stomach manufactures, and pour it on your raw food, see what happens. (Warning: don't eat the results, just observe.) It cooks every bit as well as fire -- they don't use the term "chemical burn" for nothing. Animals have chemicals inside that work for them the way our external fires work for us. (This is not the only thing we've externalized that other species keep internal.) I gave just one example, but whichever species you look at, except humans, you'll find that they have something -- super concentrated HCl, super powerful liver and pancreatic enzymes and bile... a snake swallows whatever it eats not just raw but whole -- a large anaconda can swallow a whole calf or deer, and the bile will dissolve not just meat and bones but the fur, the hooves and the horns -- it's stronger than our cooking, which won't! Whether humans have ever been bona fide animals or the outcome of some genetic messing around from the get-go is anyone's guess, but civilized humans are not, physiologically speaking, equipped to eat like wild animals. Not by a long shot. Even mice who have been born in labs are vastly different from -- and a whole lot wimpier than -- their peers born in the wild. If the former are released into the wild to live as the latter, they fail at that and promptly die. Food for thought, eh?

Those were the days of bots being beta tested.

Bots programmed to jettison torrential diarrhea onto Kunlun discussions. You can purchase one for as low as $20 these days. Bleep, bloop.

I've studied this particular subject exhaustively. Probably wrote about it somewhere more than once, but don't remember where, so to OP's question, briefly: 1. Grains (and grain-like non-grains) that neither contain gluten nor provoke cross-sensitivities to same (in most cases -- see below) are rice, glutinous rice (yup -- despite the name, there's no gluten in it), millet, quinoa, buckwheat (yup -- despite the name, not related to wheat), teff. 2. Grains that do contain gluten, besides wheat, are rye, barley, oats, amaranth, spelt. 3. The grain that doesn't technically contain gluten but in many cases causes similar problems due to cross-sensitivity provoked by proteins in it similar enough to gluten is corn. 4. Cross-sensitivities in some gluten-intolerant people can manifest in response to all grains -- and strangely enough to dairy which also contains similar enough proteins. 5. Legumes were introduced into the human diet as a way to survive a catastrophic event in our history that wiped out many primate species (in particular, on the North American continent, 150 of them -- that is to say, all of them). We would never eat this if we weren't starving, because there's a plethora of antinutrients present in legumes, from enzyme inhibitors to highly reactive lectins (ricin, which folks may have heard about in conjunction with political murders, is one of them -- and one of the most toxic substances known) to digestive difficulties to brain damage (soy specifically -- according to a 30-year study of Japanese men in Hawaii eating tofu vs. those not eating it, the largest ever and mighty convincing). So, if you stick with (1), you have six grains and grain-alikes to choose from, and don't have to eat just rice all the time. I am very partial to teff. This African grain-alike is not very well-known, but worth discovering. I was very grateful when I did. Abstaining From Grains is ideal, IMO, but not easy to pull off. I fall off the wagon from time to time. Typically, I don't eat grains every day, and when I do, they are from the (1) list. But since I don't have any explicit symptoms of gluten-related difficulties, except I start losing my far-better-than-average flexibility if I eat gluten-containing grains, occasionally I yield to the temptation. Usually short term, then back to gluten free. My litmus test is the Chen taiji move that asks for all you've got in terms of flexibility, Snake Creeps Down. It requires open "unglued" joints and vertebrae, rather than stretched-out ligaments (which can work for the yogic kind of flexibility, but not for the taiji kind.) It's like night and day, Snake on gluten and off.

another world

Today, on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, the Festival of the Seven Sisters, who reside in the Pleiades constellation, is celebrated in Taiwan, Hong Kong and other places -- it used to be one of the most important holidays of the year in China too, before PRC. The legend behind it is a folk interpretation of the taoist microcosm/macrocosm explorations and goes something like this: The Seven Sisters are the daughters of the Jade Emperor Yu Huang Da Di, who make his clothes, spinning, sewing and embroidering the entire year. But on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month they take a vacation, and go skinny dipping to a hidden beach. Once, a poor scholar Niu Lang, who supported his studies by herding cattle and is known as Cowherd Boy, stumbled across the scene. He hid behind a bush, and while watching the seven beautiful and stark naked sisters, fell in love with the youngest, Jr Nu -- Weaving Girl. He then stole her clothes and waited. The other six sisters soon came out of the water, put on their clothes, and returned to heaven. But the seventh sister couldn't, on account of not finding her clothes. That's when Cowherd Boy came out, handed them to her, and declared his love. Which was immediately reciprocated. They got married and tried to live happily ever after, as mortals on earth. The Jade Emperor didn't like it, as fathers whose will is not obeyed tended to, and so he condemned the couple to be separated the entire year. She was banished to the Weaving Girl star, he, to the Cowherd Boy constellation, with the Milky Way between them. They were allowed to meet and make love only once a year, on the evening of the 7th day of the 7th lunar month. All of the crows and magpies of earth fly to heaven on this day and make a bridge across the Milky Way so the lovers can cross it and meet. There is always a light rainfall on this evening (well, perhaps in China -- not here in SoCal ) -- the tears of the Weaving Girl shed when she meets her lover and then parts again for another year. One story, however, asserts that she cries because he doesn't wash his dishes for the whole year, and makes her clean the kitchen before they make love. In traditional China, this is the day when a woman can propose to the man of her choice. She prepares a specially embroidered silk ball and throws it at the man she has chosen. The man who receives the embroidered ball is blessed by heaven for accepting a wedding proposal on the evening of 7/7. The inner counterparts of Weaving Girl and Cowherd Boy in heaven reside here in the human body:

Of course. The Cowherd boy and the Weaving Girl are personages of the middle dantien. The middle Cinnabar Field, shaped as a spiral and located in the region of the heart, has the Cowherd Boy (Altair) just above it hold the Big Dipper, the center of the cosmos. The Weaving Girl (Vega) below it turns the Spinal Handle, opening the "second path." Everything here is significant in alchemical work.

I am reminded of the story of Bobby Leach, the first man (and the second person) to survive the fall down the Niagara waterfall (in a barrel). He later died from slipping on an orange peel in the street. There's dangers you can't prepare for, but then there's dangers you get punished for ignoring. A protagonist in one of my favorite authors' novels gets shot because he was -- well, inundated with the overall weakness of his life, his situation, his lack of will or wisdom or luck to change it. "With all of my miserable existence I constituted a tempting target for a misfortune. It didn't hesitate to accept the invitation." So my advice would be, don't try to prepare for something very specific like being jumped by multiple attackers (unless it's a realistic everyday possibility in your life, e.g. if you are a soldier in the enemy territory). Instead, try to determine where the weak spots in your overall existence are, and invest some awareness and some remedial action into trying to fix that. My own experience: from thinking, whenever I would see examples of strong, courageous, physically and emotionally competent women, "I wish I was strong like that" to undertaking things conductive to the state of affairs I wished for myself. Determine what you admire, then undertake learning how to be that. Caveat: don't cheat. People bursting with self-admiration who are not admired by anyone who knows them well enough should not be chosen as role models. Chose people who are admired the more the better you know them. Don't fake it. Be it or don't be it, but don't make-believe it to impress/fool others -- impress/convince yourself. Then multiple attackers will be convinced too -- or at least your chances of convincing them to give you a wide berth may be drastically improved. Good luck!

Where you start depends on where you're starting from. Taoism was created by folks who hardly needed to learn from scratch how to calm their body and mind and "open up stuff." And their moves were already "cool" -- see Laozi Ch.15. Different strokes. I started with the dance of Yu on my fingers. Learned to "fly" the stars, something you need to practice in order to do classical (not mickey mouse) feng shui, and learned to fly them on the palm of my hand. It means I started with the dipper, although at the time I had no idea it has anything to do with figuring out how to place your furniture. Or your feet on the ground for that matter. Or that it can be danced with your feet on the ground and your spirit among the stars if you know the moves. Or that it was a taoist meditation, a very fundamental, basic, primordial, authentic one. Like I said, took me fifteen years to connect the dots.

No. Um... your hearing difficulties are regrettable. And you won't until you resolve your hearing difficulties.

For an overview: Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women/ Thomas Cleary For a serious inquiry: Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics Including Women's Solo Meditation Texts/ Douglas Wile

Which people toward accomplishing what has to be considered. Taoism is huge. You need to decide what you want, then find out which methods are the "basic, time tested" ones toward getting that. E.g. I have some basic, time tested methods of taoist female alchemical practices. Going all the way to the immortal Sun Bu-er. Part of what they are is applicable to anyone, not just women. E.g., Sun Bu-er's poem advises to "rest your mind on your breathing and rest your breathing on your mind." Yup, that's doable and "works for people" but then what? Then comes the bulk of the specific instructions for taoist women ISO specific effects or goals. Your handle does not reveal if you are a male or a female. Assuming you're a man (most daobums are), what can you possibly gain from Sun Bu-er's time tested breast, uterus and ovarian meditations? They do work for people though... just not all people. OK... Taoism rests on a turtle and a horse. Or rather, a magical turtle of celestial origins and a dragon-horse, longma, of the same origins. The dragon-horse was sent to the founder of taoism, Fuxi, and he copied, and contemplated, and meditated on, the pattern of nine marks on its back, and came to the revelation that they represent the pattern of tao in the universe, tao fa, and that this pattern corresponds (don't ask me yet how, but it does) to the nine (sic -- two are invisible) stars of the Big Dipper. From this realization he quickly figured out the structure of the source, or should I say the Source, tao itself, and to introduce it to the human world, he interpreted the odd and even numbers of the marks he copied, in what became known as the Hetu diagram, as yin and yang, and proceeded to invent the eight trigrams as further elaborations on the map of the Source. It was all about Xiantian, the origin, tao-in-stillness. But then... ...then Emperor Yu got to meet, at river Luo, the magical turtle with another set of nine marks on its shell, standing on the back of a bigger one, a dragon-turtle that was an aspect or a manifestation of the earlier longma, and from that pattern, contemplating and meditating and grokking it, he realized that it represents tao-in-motion, Houtian, the qi dynamics of the world of manifestations. The Luoshu, the map drawn from that pattern, the magic square of nine, is again related to the Big Dipper and stands for the motion of qi between its stars that sets in motion all tao-in-motion in our manifest, Houtian world. Thus a mystery/science/practice was born. Thousands of years later it was named "taoism," after a word in a book "about" it that became very popular for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that it was very simple. Now that I've given you some background, I'll have to tell you this. Between my first discovery of the origins of taoism and my first practical skill of applying the former to the latter, fifteen minutes elapsed, it was enough -- once you understand the fundamentals, you can apply them to anything. But between my first discovery of these basics and my uprooting their connection to the Big Dipper, fifteen years had to pass -- the information was not readily available, seldom understood by those to whom it was available, and even more seldom revealed to those who didn't come to a place where they need it in order to pass through a certain "gate" in their cultivation. I needed it. I got it when I needed it, and not sooner. I don't think you do at this point. If fifteen years later you find you do, get back to me, I'll show you.

What's the destination? Traditionally, you decide based on your tradition's view of where you can realistically go with it. In modern times, with traditions lost to most ("brain waves" are nobody's traditional destination) it's like with everything else... whateverism rules. Whatever I want to believe, I believe. Whatever I do is legit because it's I, me, who is the boss of the universe and knows everything about everything. Whatever doesn't go as I expected it to, I'll find someone to blame for. Your last paragraph, I'm not sure I understand. "That" meaning what? Meditation? Is not "for reaching a better understanding of the Dao?" Whatever.