Taomeow

In taoist subtle anatomy several structures are involved that would roughly correspond to the concept of the "third eye." In cultivation they are activated in an orderly fashion and in sequence. Some of them, however, can get active spontaneously and out of sequence in some people... some, in many people. E.g., we have subtle organs in the brain known as "slanted mirrors," which for all purposes might overlap with modern science's recent discovery of the "mirror neurons" (same location in the brain), and these can and do work with images that can be both -- real and imaginary. You can empathize with a book character, "mirroring" his or her emotions if they are accurately and artfully created by the author. Just recently I came across a previously unpublished poem by a great (and my favorite) Russian poet, about a cat. It made me cry. I don't cry easily from imaginary things, I'm not sentimental. But that poem-derived cat materialized, became tangible, and stayed with me for a long time. I could feel his paws go numb with the bitter cold of winter, I could feel how weak and unloved and hungry and... oh no, I'll cry again. That's the "third everything" getting activated. Real or not?.. You decide.

1. Yes. 2. It is to an extent, statistically speaking. With some interesting peculiarities. It has been found that on average men are better at visualizing than women (a statistical difference that can disappear if you compare random individuals), except during the time in the woman's monthly cycle right before her period, when her female hormones are at the lowest. This makes a lot of sense to me, because female hormones tend to take her out of her head and ground her in the (whole) body, while visualizing stuff is an in-the-head endeavor (except of course in trained cultivators, but that's a different subject). This is a trainable skill (in both genders). I know because I went from zero to hero years ago when I decided I needed to learn to visualize. I.e. I had to start with very simple objects and by now I can visualize in higher-than-3-D spaces. I can visualize a tesseract, or a 4D Minkowski space which is a bit more complex than Euclidean, or do arcane taoist alchemical work where you have to keep your inner visual awareness on (sometimes) a dozen moving points/processes all at once. However, when I just started, all I did was follow very simple instructions from a book. Took me a while to visualize an ordinary white egg. But then I gave it polka dots. Then let it sprout chicken legs, and made it dance. Then I came across a book on raja yoga and learned some Hindu visualizations. It was a lot easier from that point on.

I like it.

Good idea to rename Off-topic. Here's a few suggestions: The Lost World A Hole Where the Rain Gets In Camera Obscura Camera Lucida

@C T Thank you for the demo. Noticed a "like water" moment at 3:02 -- an example of why a skilled taiji punch can't be blocked. It just flows over the block, like water would, "spills" on top of it and reaches the target behind it anyway.

I've pushed hands with people like that. It messes you up in the head. He doesn't literally disappear -- he's visible, looking solid right in front of you, you see your hands touching his, but the picture is not sinking in correctly because the touch is not registering. Against your push he uses going below your sensory radar. You push, your eyes say "we see you push him," your hands say "we feel pushing nothing," your mind says "well, guys, make up your mind. Is he there or not? Who do I listen to? Who do I trust?" Exquisite. The remedy for this kind of an opponent is... well, like cures like. Forget "be like water." Be like water that evaporates on contact and knows in advance when and where and how the contact is going to take place before the contacting party knows it. You can't fake this kind of non-presence, you have to genuinely remove yourself from the picture before it is believed by the opponent's sensory radar. The simple explanation for the peculiarity of IMA so ridiculed by the those-who-don't-get-it party is this. A low/intermediate skill is neither pointless nor extraordinary, but demoing it under the wrong circumstances is extraordinarily pointless because it is a stage in a rather complex and usually lengthy process, not its outcome. The outcome this process leads toward is high level skill -- and that's a qualitative jump, not quantitative. The Supreme Ultimate Fist is not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Ah, the wonders of Wiki. Of course the sources it peruses were fabricated when there were no female linguists. Now that they exist, I prefer some of their interpretations, including the tongue-in-cheek ones. Check out something more interesting on the subject: https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/

I've met several former hardcore karate and MMA folks who are currently the students of a taiji master in his early 90s, someone who has no internet presence (I know of him because a friend of mine is his disciple). They practically can't shut up when they talk about how this teacher turned their world inside out, upside down from the first demo of what he can do to them. I've met this crowd at a few parties (I'm not part of the crowd) and it's always the same -- they have a few drinks and start telling those stories, interrupting each other, corroborating each other's experiences if they were witnesses, eyes wide with amazement and awe, and they can't shut up. Unless it's a conspiracy to fool me specifically, consistently maintained for years, I tend to believe the stories. And the moral of the story is always the same: you know nothing about top level martial skill unless you meet a top level taiji master willing to show you. What I know about him is, he's been practicing taiji for 80 years, and every night he gets up at 3 am and meditates for several hours, then does taiji for several hours, then goes about his day. He often travels to Southeast Asia where he decided to make himself known to the public only when he turned 80, and since then had been a superstar in the martial circles, so they keep inviting him and he doesn't mind flying this kind of distance for the red carpet treatment. If you know of a "pain or glory" 90-year-old who has a similar lifestyle, I'd be really curious to find out who he or she is.

I remember my first encounters with the TKD folks. Asked some of the best if they competed, and the youngsters said yes, and older folks said no. Why not? Haven't you won this and that? Yes, they said, but. Too traumatic, they said. Too many broken ribs, knee surgeries, torn ligaments, I've no time or stamina or money to keep getting hurt like that, it's painful and annoying and interrupts my life. Same conversations when I started taiji -- asked the best if they competed. Well, my teacher did when he was around 20, was the champion of Beijing. He's incomparably more accomplished forty years later. But how would he prove it to a gaping spectator of sports?.. He would have to compete or else the spectator might suspect he's fake?.. "I was just a kid," he says, explaining the competing past. I once asked him if he could recommend a good TCM doctor, and he replied, apologetically, "I don't know any doctors at all, I have never been sick." Taiji is for grown-ups. Biological age doesn't matter. Psychological age of a real taiji player is "adult." Competitive sports -- "just a kid." What adults do, some perennial little kids might think of as "fake." E.g. fighting a battle for not knowing any doctors and winning it, for eliminating as many doctors as possible from your students' lives and winning it... that's probably part of what's "fake" about taiji, and putting your body through as many pissing contests as it can handle before falling apart to prove you can take the pain and hurt the other guy -- that must be something "real." At least to some little kids who are fighting with all they've got for their chance to grow old and sick without growing up.

Everything else is also made of what it is not. They don't say "the total is not the sum of its parts" for nothing.

Ah, here's an improvement I'm discovering. Used to have trouble dragging pictures I wanted to post to this site. Looks like now it's working. Cool!

Right this minute I lost the ability to say "thank you" in mid-thread, just FYI. I.e. I clicked "thank you" a couple of times while reading this and it worked, and then clicked again on the next post and the next and it doesnt't. The button merely turns a whiter shade of pale.

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You don't see the problem? The Chinese have applied to include taiji in the Olympic sports. So far, no luck, but this is part of an overall trend. Taiji is being peddled as a sport -- in the east and in the west alike. We've just seen one dismal practical outcome of this trend. And you are talking about what "should" or "shouldn't" be happening. Whereas I was talking about "why" it shouldn't be happening... one "why" out of a hundred I could expound on.

This is a very important point. Not that the "master" beaten in the video is likely to have anything I would call taiji. But in the case of a real deal. I have no clue how I, personally, would use taiji (which is emphatically not a sport) as a "sport" in a "competition" against a sport-by-design that does not have the same rules of engagement. Real taiji folks (I'm not talking highest level masters here, just people who have the skill, let's say intermediate level -- some 15-20 years of good lineage taiji) know how to do it so as not to harm and how to do it so as to harm. They have no idea how to do the in-between encouraged by MMA and other sports. Never learned that. It's something from sports, and taiji is not a sport. It's not all things. It's not a PC, a refrigerator, a walk-in closet, or a sport. It's not any of these things... so what does it prove about what it is?.. If it's a friendly sparring, they won't harm the opponent. If it's a real-life self-defense situation, a life-and-death situation, they will harm to the extent they know how. Taiji is (as Gerard rightfully pointed out) devastating, and fully controlling what you can do is a skill that comes later than being able to do it. So they might use taiji of the mind to avoid a real-life confrontation. But if it's unavoidable, they have to be mentally prepared that what they can do, they don't know how to stop before it does too much. See the problem?..

And for perspective -- here's is a real-life fight where taiji is used indeed: In Chen style form, this move is known as "brush knee." It has many applications, this is one of them. But more importantly, watch the attitude of the taiji guy in the beginning of the confrontation. He hides (not flaunts!!) his skill, and avoids rather than seeks escalation -- till the bully mistakes this attitude for weakness and attacks. Then the skill spontaneously explodes. This is taiji.

This is what happens in the era of labels mistaken for phenomena. So Mr. Wei Lei thought what he had was "taiji." And now the world has been misinformed because what he has is not taiji, and whatever it is he has proved inefficient, yet the world has been led to the conclusion that it is taiji that is inefficient. There's no such thing as "thunder style taiji." Mr. Wei Lei is a practitioner of something someone labeled "thunder style taiji," which is not taiji. I have no idea what it is and what it's for.

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And love to you too, Karen!

You are not the only one. I saved my first tree when I just turned four. In spring, they planted young poplar saplings in a tiny park next to where I lived, and some idiot with a knife attempted to cut one of them down for purposes unknown, not finishing the job however and leaving a huge gaping wound on the trunk, low enough for me to reach. The wound oozed dark poplar blood. The leaves and branches were going lifeless. I resolved to try healing the tree. I got all the medications that I was familiar with from scraping my own knees or elbows, and applied them to the wound -- sterilized it (this discouraged countless little gnats interested in the sap), liberally applied fresh plantain leaves (I would still do it today for my own scraped knee -- perfect healing herb), and then bandaged the trunk with gauze. Every day, when they brought me home from kindergarten, I would check on the tree, change the dressing on the wound, change the bandage. I think I was at it for about a month. One of the biggest thrills was to visit the neighborhood some fifteen years later, after I'd lived elsewhere, and remember that tree and go check on it. It was now a magnificent, mighty poplar, home to many cheerfully chirping birds, different from all its slender neighbors only in that way high above my head, there was a big bump on the trunk, a scar from that near-lethal wound it had survived with my help. It felt so good to stand there talking to that tree.

Which is unfortunately crossed in either direction when one of those drugs in current use is administered, and there's enough evidence to suspect that the push toward more danger to themselves or others rather than less in people put on those is not uncommon. I don't think there's been even one mass shooting in this country where prescription medications were not involved. Some people become dangerous while taking them, others become dangerous when they stop taking them after having been taking them (the damage is often permanent so both medication and withdrawal from medication can trigger outbursts of dangerous behavior). One seldom noticed downside to medicine as we currently experience it is not just a lack of safe and efficient drugs, but a lack of incentives to develop them. Take antibiotics, e.g.. Not entirely safe, but at least efficient toward curing (not "managing") illness -- until more and more resistant strains which, as people in the know predict, will overwhelm the field in a very short while, a decade or so, give or take, with scarcely any antibiotics currently used still remaining efficient at all once the bugs catch up, as they always do. Seems to be a good time to develop new antibiotics, right? Well, pharmaceutical companies are not interested. You take an antibiotic for an infection for five to seven days, if it's working, it's going to do the job, and then what? Where's the megaprofits from putting someone (hundreds of millions of "someones") on a drug that must be taken daily for the rest of their life?.. That's where all the "research" goes. Into drugs you can't get off from. The best sellers... If there was research as massive into the best-performing psychiatric drugs (or any other kind for that matter) as there currently is into the most profit-generating ones, who knows... maybe we would have those cures. But in the current situation, we can't have them. For anything.

Only in the West though. Where if you go back more than 100 years, the fate of the mentally ill was even worse. But elsewhere, they were neither ostracized nor abused. Most societies elsewhere believed (some still do, notably Hinduist and Buddhist) that if someone is crazy, it means his or her spirit does not reside in their body (partially or completely) and is instead hanging out in other realms, which is why the body and the earthly mind behave so erratically. In most such places, the body was left alone unless its behavior threatened other bodies (contrary to popular belief, the percentage of violent people among the mentally ill is small -- about the same as among sane people). In many cases, they were treated with extra respect and considered "holy" or "saintly" or "blessed" as in "touched by god." The old Russian word for "mentally ill" -- "blazhenny" -- means literally this, as is evidenced in the name of the most famous cathedral, translated as St.Basil's, in the original Vasily Blazhenny -- Vasily the Holy Fool: Oh, and of course there was treatment when human communities were shamanic. The shaman journeyed to the other realms in search of the lost spirit and retrieved it. In case of success (even today such cases are being documented, despite a drastic shortage of fully fledged and adequately trained shamans), the person was cured, not "managed."

Let me tell you another ayahuasca story, which of course you are free to believe or not. At one point, She asked me, "do you want me to, as they say where you're from, 'expand your consciousness'?" She has this wicked sense of humor, and couldn't just let the triteness of this cliche slide -- so She said it, not in a pompous way assorted self-appointed gurus say it, but in a way that made me question the whole idea. Are you sure you know what "expand" means, it implied. What "your" means? What "consciousness" really is?.. That was pretty much characteristic of all our exchanges -- She made me examine under the microscope every notion I ever had... But, OK, She was still waiting for an answer, and I got it that She got it that there was much irony to the question. Still, I said "yes." She then asked, "how far?" "I don't know... what are my options?" She said, "as far as it can go in the universe is one. This whole planet, another. Or just to the edges of this forest." I didn't have to think about it, I knew by then that I should always ask Her for less or it will always be too much. "To the edges of this forest," I said. She immediately connected me to everything in the mighty rain forest of the Amazon. The punch line? Turned out it didn't matter if I said "this whole planet" or "as far as it can go in the universe," it turned out to be the same thing. The forest is connected to everything else. There's so many methods of communication -- underground roots great and small and never-ending, waterways, animals and birds and insects and microbes and aquatic creatures, voices, seeds, assorted fields of electrochemical impulses, enzymes and thermal signals and visible and invisible light and fields I couldn't identify but could perceive in that state, pheromones, biochemical sports (sic) -- sometimes bordering on warfare, but with rules of engagement carefully observed (the rule is, live and let live -- only let die when it doesn't disrupt the overall chain of life, in fact, only when it is impossible to maintain the chain of life without something dying when it's its turn) -- but above all it's communication going on nonstop, it's like a superinternet... everything in communication with everything, and ayahuaska provides a kind of DNA-based wifi that reaches as far as life itself -- all of the planet and all of the galaxy and possibly all planets and galaxies in the whole wide multiverse. The information goes everywhere. Everywhere there's life, or was or will be, everybody knows what we're up to. Everybody knows how we treated our forests. It's broadcasted far and wide -- beyond space and time -- into eternity. So that sage who said, "think as though your every thought is written in fire in the sky for everyone to see, because in reality, it is" was not wrong. I would only add, "act as though your every action..."