Taomeow

Then I hope we're done. I can't do better than me. Me is someone who makes no sense to you. I can totally live with that.

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I never said "non judgmental," an expression I find profoundly meaningless. I said, effectively, "don't judge what you don't know." And, gee, I don't. I know hard MA. I know taiji. I can tell one from the other. And then there's those countless This Animal's Claw or That Animal's Scales styles that I "judge" as "never heard of them" -- well, that's not "being judgmental," just demonstrating some brain activity, wouldn't you agree? I said I never heard of it. It's a fact. Here's another fact -- didn't watch your video but I see someone in boxing attire wearing boxing gloves. This is not taiji. Much less Chen style. I've been practicing Chen style taiji for many years, as the thirteenth generation practitioner in my particular Chen village lineage. That's how I know. Really. It's not about winning an argument. It's about not letting what you see on youtube compromise your cognitive functions. They should, ideally, be derived from personal life's experience. Am I making sense?

The founding father said it to the son who was his disciple? You should hear what my teacher says to me on occasion. But he is my teacher. He is the person entitled to judge my taiji, our co-creation. He is the one who gave it to me and I am the one who asked for it and took it for my own. He is the one entitled to judge if I handle what he gave me well or poorly. No one else. And what "recent match" are you referring to? The one that was staged and publicized in order to distract the public in China from the purge in the government undertaken at that particular moment by its head? It had nothing whatsoever to do with Chen village. I've never heard of whatever the style is the sitting duck (or rather, flapping duck) master demonstrated. Here's what my grandmaster had to say when mentioning the event:

Double torus. Known to taoists as taiji.

Thank you. Now I know the drill.

It's seldom so windy here that handsaws go flying. If I see one, I duck. Whereas when I see a hawk, and hear a duck quack, I don't have a clue how to finish this.

We all have our good days. As the Duke of Zhou put it, "even a malnourished troll pig can rage like a ferocious beast on occasion." But "cluelessness" is not a chronic condition with those who don't mind getting a clue if they realize they don't have it, while being a malnourished troll pig is, I'm afraid. Someone, somewhere failed to feed it at a crucial developmental stage. So no amount of feedback will ever abate that hunger. That's the wisdom behind the "don't feed the troll" mantra. It's not heartless. Just pragmatic.

Your humility is admirable, but you're no match for the knight in clueless armor depicted in that portrait.

If you have a chance, and find yourself so inclined, get acquainted with D.C. Lau's work in more depth. In passing one may not necessarily appreciate how much and how well he did for real translations of taoist classics -- rather than taking assorted poetic and (which is way worse) ideological liberties as Feng/English (and countless others) have done. In particular, if you compare his translation of TTC with his translation of the Yuandao (and don't miss out on his preface), you will probably see the consistency of taoist-proper thought originating way before Laozi and reflected in TTC -- sometimes verbatim from earlier sources.

Forget heavy lifting. With a certain kind, the thing to remember is not to feed them. They only grow bigger and heavier when fed.

Oh, videos are useless, because an army of armchair warriors trained to scream "fake! fake video! staged!" at the top of their lungs is always ready and waiting for them. At one point someone posted on youtube a video of my teacher doing a push-hands demo against ten guys at a seminar, some of them twice his size, all of them falling like dominoes, and I saw dozens of comments under the video explaining to the "gullible suckers" how this is 1) extremely easy to do, anyone could do it; 2) absolutely impossible and therefore staged, completely fake; 3) yada yada yada. I've known my teacher for many years. He hasn't taught me how to push ten guys apiece yet, but he did teach me how to push one, twice my size, half my age, athletic, and resisting with all his might, so I know that it's neither easy to learn nor fake once mastered. The interesting part being that even the guy I pushed, well he was there, right? I pushed him every time, so he comes back with, "yeah, you are very strong." I tell him, no, that's not it, it's taiji, it's structure, usage, internal training, it's a technique, I've been taught. He goes, "yeah, some people are genetically very strong. You must be one of them." Skepticism can be a fundamentalist religion like anything else, and the thing about fundamentalist religions is, they are not abandoned because of evidence to the contrary presented. Any evidence. Even the evidence of their own senses, as I've discovered. One has to suspend fundamentalist beliefs first... then evidence can be evaluated. Otherwise it's like the Earth having been created six thousand years ago. No amount of dinosaur bones radiometrically dated two hundred million years old will convince the believer. God could easily fake dinosaur bones. To test the believers' faith, see.

Thanks for elaborating. I think that's great!

Could you elaborate? Off grid as in, no electricity/running water/sewage, fully autonomous? Or did you mean something else?

Wow, you've astral traveled to Nibiru? Cool! Have you met Anu by any chance? Enki? Enlil? Those guys are rad... As for the second scenario, that's entirely plausible too. There's a pretty cool sci-fi novel, by George R.R. Martin (much better known to the public as the author of Game of Thrones) titled Tuf Voyages. There's this small remote world afflicted periodically by the "plague star" that inflicts disease and pestilence every time it approaches it. The "plague star" eventually turns out to be the "Ark," an ancient, 30-kilometer-long "seedship," a very powerful warship with advanced ecological engineering capabilities, which once belonged to the long-defunct Federal Empire's Ecological Engineering Corps and was created to have the ability to rewrite genetic coding -- at a distance and by force if "ecological engineers" deemed it necessary. The main protagonist, a cat-loving (but not very fond of humans) loner Tuf, via assorted twists and turns of the plot, takes possession of this Ark, fixes it, and starts playing god... for profit. I read this a long time ago and remember only vaguely, I recall some parts were a tad boring, but some made me squeal with delight. I have utmost respect for creative imaginations rooted in carefully observed and accurately processed phenomena and trends of actual everyday reality. This one was a fine example.

It looks worse than what it is. Not what it might have been if someone took a pic inside one of those experimental genetics facilities that abound around these parts but are not all that penetrable to picture-taking outsiders. I.e. not a human-cat heterochimera. It's just a cat who stole a human jaw and brought it to his owner as a gift.

Ask a taoist. Acausal paradigms abound in taoism. Instead of "this causes that," it's "this and that arise together." Modern physics keeps stumbling across these phenomena lately -- quantum entanglement is one example. Another one, this coming from astrophysicists, is a recently discovered curious fact that stars are always born binary. If a star doesn't currently have a twin, something happened to it later, but they arise together. (Yes, our sun was born with a twin too... god only knows what it's up to now, 4.5 billion years later... and which parts of its fate share the same "cause" with "our" sun -- and which ones don't. The part that clearly is a different effect even though the cause was the same -- the birth of a binary star system -- is me and you looking at sunrise and sunset of one of those suns on planet Earth, something that is not happening to the twin sun, wherever it roams.) Taoists know that the Big Bang is one of those "acausal" phenomena, arising spontaneously from the third trigram of Xiantian, Earlier Heaven, which all of a sudden, and for no reason other than its inherent nature, which includes the ability to spontaneously discharge a bolt of lightning, manifests what it is -- Spring/Thunder/Beginning. It does not need an external or internal "cause" for this effect. Its nature "arises spontaneously." (Much like I make coffee in the morning -- me arising and coffee arising are not each other's cause and effect, they just arise together because it's my nature. )

Nice. Last summer in Temecula

By popular demand reposting what that half and half post was about.

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