Taomeow

There is no "proper taoist meditation" but there's "taost-proper" meditation. Proprietary. Idiosyncratic. Much like in a church, a mosque, an ashram or a temple there may be prayer taking place, but prayer to Jesus is Christian-proper, and if you go to a Catholic church and pray to Allah aloud, it's going to raise an eyebrow or two. However, if in your heart you feel Allah is more likely to answer your prayer than Jesus, who's to stop you from praying to him? Just don't roll out the salah rug in front of the crucifix and don't lift your butt toward it while you're doing your Mecca-facing prostrations. That would be "improper." The trance state, except for a very narrow band of applications, is not indicated in the taoist tradition -- it's all about consciousness. Trance is an absentee state, meditation is a present state. The concept of "meditation" is not "Buddhist-proper." Even animals meditate. (Confirmed scientifically by brain waves monitoring.) The premises and goals is what determines the techniques. Original taoist methods and goals are based on the taoist-proper view of the nature of reality, which does not overlap with the Buddhist view except in the mind of a modern eclectic individual. Meditation is not a destination. It's a means of transportation. You can get from New York to Los Angeles on foot, by plane, by car, or by teleportation. But if you choose your destination as Los Angeles, you don't want to board the plane going to Warsaw. If you don't know where you're going with your journey and what for, and just want to go somewhere for a change of scene, that's fine too, but it's not taoist meditation. It's Western "relaxation." The "you" is generic, not singling out you personally.

It was for some, apparently. At the extreme end of the spectrum, two people, one I knew and one I knew of via mutual acquaintances, died the day after the eclipse. The day before, the marriage of someone I'm fairly close to fell apart. And I've seen lively discussions of "post-eclipse symptoms" and even "post-eclipse sickness" online. I didn't feel particularly affected, except for a certain volatility of energy, mood and dreams. Had "mundane" dreams two nights in a row, which is exceptionally rare for me, and the second one went lucid, which is even rarer.

Thanks for your thoughts, MrP! I wouldn't presume to know what you mean by "tuple/egregore effect," but the general idea of co-creation you seem to be tracking is pivotal in all taoist endeavors. You are not "created" passively and you do not "create" yourself from scratch. The outcome of co-creating with tao is a state of "embodying" it. "When the superior man hears about the tao, he embodies it" -- Laozi. Not "follows" as many translate this well-known passage. And most certainly not thinks, believes, decides, agrees, disagrees, likes, dislikes and so on. Embodies. Simple? Uh-huh...

Merriam-Webster lists 9 meanings (with a number of sub-meanings) of the word "proper," of which you seem to know #7 and #8 and assume that that's what I meant. However, in reality I meant #1, #2 and #6. Context, man. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proper You asked about "going back to the origins of taoism," and that's what I answered. The documented origins of taoism predate Laozi by about 4 thousand years. Well, if you already know everything, perhaps instead of asking a question you should have given a lecture to begin with? That, I would have left without comments. Consider yourself successful in fooling me into believing you really asked a question. Won't happen again.

Well, yes, some battles in the spirit world are aeons old. Too bad too many priests have been on the wrong side for quite a while. Lineage is of course necessary, but not everyone has every lineage for every purpose. I got three lineage arts, of which I consistently practice two. This is enough for me to branch out into some (many) "sister arts" for which I don't have lineage but which cross-pollinate with mine. Occasionally they are not even "sister" but "mother" arts -- e.g., the I Ching, which predates everybody's lineages by thousands of years. So I might ask the I Ching if I dare undertake a task before undertaking it). Others may have their own methods of figuring stuff out. "Power" is not a bad thing. Abuse of power is the bad thing. Most people who want to save the world wind up abusing power as soon as they get any. More people have no power at all and exacerbate the abuse by giving theirs away to those who would abuse it. The non-use of power that is rightfully yours is a form of abuse of power. Power comes with responsibility to use it -- wisely. I have the power to feed my cat, who's meowing for his dinner right now. If I refuse to use it, it will constitute power abuse -- and possibly cat abuse if he's really, really hungry. (He's not. He's abusing his power to get me to drop everything in response to a particular meowing pitch that pulls on my heart's strings, and feed him right meow. I let him, so he's taken my power to decide when to feed my cat away from me.)

There sure is. It is called money and power. Shamans were the original exorcists, but they were not ordained. They were either chosen or accepted by the spirit world as suitable for the task. A priest may or may not be suitable for the task. A taoist exorcist may or may not be a priest. Self-help exorcism is not a blanket "don't do it" territory, although superficial dabblers are usually in danger in any territory, be it exorcism or stock market investments. The reasons behind the admonition can be numerous. "Don't DIY or the priest will go hungry." Or "don't DIY if you don't know how and no one who does know how ever taught you." Or "don't DIY if you are up against something way more powerful than what you know how to handle." (Then again, in this situation, most priests will also be useless). Avoidance works well if no one is bothering you. Once bothered, you may find all bets are off. You do what you have to do.

I'll get back to you on that. I read that story when I was 3, and aside from the crocodile, don't remember what other characters it had and what they were up to. Will have to look it up if I can find it online.

Link?

It does to me. Bastards.

no makeup

Not alligator. Crocodile. In Russian, it rhymes with "swallowed." And Russians are largely descended from the Vikings (the Rus tribe that invaded what is currently known as Western Russia in the 9th century and gave the land its name was Swedish) who traveled far and wide, reaching among other places the Mediterranean, where one could expect to encounter a crocodile or two brought from Africa. Besides, some of those Rus folks were literate.

The Greeks "invented" everything courtesy of the Great Silk Road. "The Greek miracle?" Look what the arabs dragged in, pretty much. Where did they drag it in from? If we're talking science and technology, mostly from China. If we're talking science and technology in China, that's mostly taoist endeavors. And if we're talking their scientific instruments... the Antikythera Mechanism looks like a Western interpretation of a beginner's luopan.

Taoists have been accurately predicting eclipses for 4,000 years (with only one fatal mistake that cost two court astronomers their heads when they failed to warn the fourth king of the Xia dynasty of an upcoming solar eclipse.) Whatever symbolic meanings occultists later ascribed to the events can't hold a sun candle to the theory that yielded such spectacular empirical success. To wit, the theory that the sun gets eaten by a dragon... that's in China, whereas in Vietnam it's eaten by a giant frog, in India by a giant humanoid monster, in Norse mythology by a bunch of wolves, in Native American tradition by a bear, and in a Russian nursery rhyme by a crocodile.

We only had 60%, still pretty cool. I got eclipse glasses for this, and planned some taoist magical endeavors -- nothing major, just charging an object suitable for the task with the 60%yin/40% yang qi of the moment. For some reason, three of my neighbors, who are usually not all that neighborly, congregated at my door and spent most of the eclipse time there, chatting and swapping stories, well and also using my and my son's eclipse glasses because all they had was some technology from the 1940s, i.e. an empty cereal box with a cut-out square, a colander, and nothing at all, respectively. The weirdest thing was my cat's behavior. He's normally completely antisocial with people and the moment someone approaches my door, he hides in the kitchen cupboard behind the pots faster than I can answer the door. He's always avoided meeting the neighbors at all costs. This time, however, he got out and joined the party, plumping down next to everybody's feet and chilling. This has never happened before. The eclipse must have reprogrammed his brain -- whether temporarily or permanently, time will tell. The end of eclipse I had a taiji private and drove to my teacher's, combining the last fifteen minutes of partiality with total immersion in practice.

Of course. What else today... except maybe also this

Methinks Zhuangzi is trying to explain to civilized people why being civilized is a distorted, damaged state. However, most people who read what he wrote read it from a civilized, distorted, damaged perspective, so he is seldom understood. We "need" kings? A king is a stand-off for an abusive parent to a helpless, powerless, and fully dependent infant. The Chinese state (and every other for that matter) is modeled on this pattern and no other. Do we "need" abusive parents to survive? Hardly. Would we succeed in transference onto abusive kings of our attitude toward mommy and daddy if our real mommy and daddy were living a life we wanted, and could, replicate by simply being around them and imitating their harmonious, life-affirming and life-supporting ways? Not for a second. Do we need abusive stand-offs for parents to learn to be obedient toward being exploited? Yup. How else would we be so successfully trained and conditioned to be exploited instead of living if refusal to be exploited wasn't punishable by death? Sages... Where do they come from, the sages who teach humanity? Who are they? The invasion of a superior civilization always results in the destruction of the "simple" natural life. (Which is not really "simple" in the sense "simplistic life of simpletons" as we are led to believe -- only simple in the sense "free of contorted artificiality.") One may want to think hard about what "sages" are really about. A taoist, typically, has two paths. Zhuangzi's, Laozi's somewhat jaded, often wistful pining for the harmonious ways of the "real human." Or the "if you can't beat them, join them" path of cultivational, alchemical, magical, scientific (sic), immortalist taoism. Follow the sages not because people are better off due to their presence but simply because they are here and they call the shots. Try to become one of them. And screw the human -- whether natural, "real," tao-made or civilized, unreal, mired in man-made (but at the source sage-made) illusions from birth to death. Then perhaps there's the middle way...

Or like war and sanctions.

"Happy" and "angry" are not a yang-yin polarity though. You can be yang-happy and yin-happy, yang-angry and yin-angry.

The fruits of my practice? In Xi Wangmu's garden the peach trees put forth leaves once in a thousand years, and the peaches take another three thousand years to ripen. Ask me later what they taste like.

Now locked on the prey, macrofages infuri- ate the big pharma.

Let me catch a ride on your chariot, Freyja. Emerald headlights!

Looking for input from anyone familiar with any one of the above.

I have it translated by Michael Nylan (a few years later).

Passing on the torch: Statue of Liberty←Maut↔ Isis→Hecate