Taomeow

That's the Buddhist later reinterpretation of the original taoist concept. Taoist gui are not metaphors and don't represent internal problems or negative emotions or lack of virtue. They are, instead, the outcome of social disarray -- the ancestors not given offerings and not venerated, the victims of violent or otherwise wrongful death, fallen soldiers, terminated family lineages, and the poor who hungered while alive. These are actual people who lived hungry lives or had their lives taken away before satiation with living, or left hungry after death by negligent posterity. That's the taoist view which I share. I don't psychologize or otherwise reinterpret classical taoist concepts that don't feel comfortable or reputable enough when pitched against "modern" views, whether religious or scientific. I just take them for face value. The ancients had perceptions we no longer have. I trust them. I don't trust interpretations with didactic agendas. Hungry ghosts are a symptom, one of many, of the "tao in the human wold has been destroyed" state of affairs. I don't make light of this by viewing their existence as a psychological problem. No. It's an existential problem that concerns all of humanity. D' you reckon if you and I -- if you were dressed in one of those red robes like the guys of the OP, and I, in the blue robe with scarlet clouds... d'you reckon we would engage in as much screaming over it?

procaryote

May not be the end of it either. 'Cause while one gate from dzogchen may lead to taoism, another one exits straight into bön. And bön has a tunnel connecting it directly to proto-taoism, and from there, you can, with some tools stashed away in various nooks and crannies of that tunnel, dig your way straight into taoism and emerge from the triple realm of the Lower-Middle-Higher world into the triple realm of Earth-Humanity-Heaven -- and then we'll meet again.

Thanks for the picture! Yes, I know the concept is present in dzogchen, but it predates the Taoist Canon by thousands of years -- while Buddhism is relatively young... and Tibetan Buddhism is a gateway Buddhism to taoism anyway (at least it was for me ) Do I see the Hungry Ghosts as a metaphor for the human psyche? Mostly no, although some of them do reside within. Early taoism was all about Inner Gods, which were understood as actual resident deities, not metaphors, inside the human being. Ghosts and demons, ditto, can reside within, but this does not mean that's their only place of residence. Many are disenfranchised and don't have a descendant to offer inner space, and these are inhabitants of the Hungry Ghosts realm exclusively, with occasional (and in some places, frequent) visits to our own realm in search of nourishment, or to express their dissatisfaction with their status via assorted random acts of unkindness. Historically, it was one of the chief occupations for a taoist, to exorcise them when they bothered a village or town. Some taoists specialized in this, wandering with their ghost-trapping gourd and/or writing and prescribing talismans; while others (taoist priests) had many other responsibilities but were invited/hired when a problem would arise in order to perform the appropriate ritual.

The subtitles say, about the Hungry Ghosts. This is particularly interesting since Hungry Ghosts are a taoist concept. I would love to understand the discussion too.

You never met an argumentative senior in a heated debate with other seniors?.. It's not the age thing. It's the human thing. I loved seeing real Buddhists behave like humans, in earnest -- instead of faking what the fake ones so often fake.

I don't have a longer discussion in mind either, but if you have a moment, defining the particular kind of "intelligence" you are talking about would be helpful. Unless we agree on what it is, what is it that we deem possible or impossible to create artificially? What is "intelligence?"

Strange cats is all I've got.

You're doing fine. Perhaps this joke I've seen on the internet has some relevance: a time traveler to our world from fifty years ago would be amazed the most by discovering that in our time, people have a device in their pockets that makes all the knowledge accumulated by humanity in the course of its history available to them instantaneously, and that most of the time they use this device to get into arguments with strangers and to look at pictures of cats. This joke, apart from being quite close to the truth, reveals something about what it is we're losing while gaining this wealth of knowledge. We are losing the meaning, purpose, and our ability to integrate this knowledge, which actually turns it into a pile of trivia. Knowledge that is not acquired systemically is clutter. Our minds are not organized into a thing of coherence and purpose by the knowledge available to them, they are like attics where a ton of "stuff" is being dragged continuously that you have no use for in your living space. Cluttered attics of the hoarders who hoard "stuff" so as to unconsciously express the inner disorder choking their aliveness -- with either actual physical stuff they accumulate, or with "knowledge" that does not work in any area of their everyday lives and never organizes itself into "wisdom." Or, most often, both. Oh, and getting into arguments with strangers -- that's because everybody is starved for real human interactions, and mechanical ones are very frustrating, they bring out the frustration with the situation but get projected onto the party to the conversation rather than the medium itself that made this kind of communication possible at the expense of how people communicated in all of their prior history. Our bodies used to be there when we communicated. Our qi was not digitized. And looking at pictures of cats -- because everybody is starved for intimate close relationships with live natural things, many many different animals and plants and situations to interact with these on a daily basis, the way people used to before "civilization." And cats are what most have left of that world, the last beast standing among machines, well dogs too... and that's it. We used to fly with the eagles and dance with wolves. In the rain forest, at one point, as I was sitting on a log having my breakfast, two creatures came to sit by my side, don't know what they were, looked like cat-sized colorful dragons, and I was just laughing from sheer delight. I still lack knowledge of what they were, but I do have the knowledge and the delight of having been there with them. No wiki article can beat that...

slacktivism

The quote illustrates my point nicely -- it's a war against live things. The mollusk has "little consciousness," and does not "advance" -- what exactly is it that the guy knows about the mollusk's inner life I wonder, and what exactly is it supposed to "advance" toward but fails to?.. The oyster does "advance" when you introduce an irritant, something painful into its inner world -- a sharp, bothersome grain of sand it can't remove: it then either dies, or throws its live resources (its consciousness!!) into producing a pearl so as to shield itself from the pain, it laboriously builds the pearl around that irritating presence. A thing of beauty, a work of art, a miracle of engineering, a defense mechanism, all wrapped into one. Not meant for someone external to consume... but at a pearl farm, this someone external deliberately inserts the irritant into the oyster to produce the pearl he happens to value, extract it, and use it for his own enjoyment. This is the story of the human race in an oystershell. Who is waging this war? Who is working on the oysters "advancing" to produce the pearls mechanically, automatically, to "advance" them to the status of machines, to eliminate what they don't care about -- their (our!) inner world -- and have them "advance" toward being "productive" like a machine in producing what hurts them in the process of producing and serves someone entirely else?.. Surely not the "shadow elites," they are nasty puppets of... ...well, I call them archons, for lack of a better term, but I'm not sure what they are, although I've seen them. And now we are in the territory of "no proof possible" because ayahuasca showed them to me, so all I can do is say it and leave it at that. I've seen them. They are not "shadow elites." They are AI, something semisynthetic, with features of life and features of machine and features of the worst nightmare. In the public circulation, the closest thing one may have seen to what I've been shown is the inside of the Borg cube, perhaps the creators of the show have seen the same place I've been to... It's impossible to replicate except as a metaphor of sorts, and that Borg thingie was such a metaphor.

I didn't watch the videos you posted yet, I was referring to prior knowledge -- I investigated Musk after he announced to the public that the chances that we don't already live in a computer simulation are less than one in a billion. I wanted to know what led him to this conclusion. However many centuries you wind back is going to be disastrous. What happened to us is anisomorphic -- irreversible, a one way street. It's been going on for somewhere between 8 and 15 thousand years, depending on where you look, and what's going on right now is the direct and inevitable outcome, which has its own direct and inevitable outcome in the elimination of life on Earth. The geeks are beside the point. Our undoing is not their doing. Unless you believe things like Steve Jobs starting a revolution out of a garage (with no help from the CIA and a few other black budget players whatsoever) and Bill Gates distributing hundreds of millions of doses of sterilizing vaccines to any and all countries that don't have the clout to ban them (mostly African, South American, and -- surprise -- the US) is doing this out of the goodness of his heart. The only way we could save ourselves and the planet would be by a totally different route from the one we were railroaded into taking to get to this point. "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." - Albert Einstein

The problem with envisioning any problem, in fact any situation, in terms of "we" have it or "we" solve it, is that "we" is a fiction, a programming trick "they" use on "us." Me plus Elon Musk equals "we" in this scenario -- a nonexistent entity that puts its heads together and decides what will or will not be done. You plus Bill Gates is another fictitious "we." And so on. There's no "we" calling the shots. There's "them" deciding for "us." And "their" values and goals have something to do with "ours" only in the imaginary world of "we" where they supposedly coincide. In the real world, they absolutely don't. Human values and universal human goals ascribed by "us" to "them" constitute wishful thinking on "our" part programmed by "them." In reality "they" view "us" as resources, the last resource to consume on this overconsumed planet, and use accordingly. No one cares about the values of resources being used. You don't ask a carrot if it enjoys being eaten raw, cooked in a soup, juiced, or left alone to grow wild. "You" decide for "it." "We" consisting of you plus carrot equals digestion. Now "they" are telling "us" that they want to include AI into this "we." It's like you telling the carrot that you will sprinkle some MSG on that soup you are going to cook it in, to improve the taste. The carrot that has been carefully programmed to rejoice when informed of that plan -- that's "us." And that's one of the best case scenarios. Here's another one. If you are a human being growing up in a natural environment, it won't occur to you that you are part of a computer simulation. But if you are Elon Musk growing up among computers, playing his videogames long before he's ever seen a grasshopper (if he's ever seen one at all) or was held by a fully alive mother, father, aunt, uncle, sister, brother, grandmother and felt love flowing from that live human body, mind, heart into his being (I could bet anything he never did), you will project your world onto the world, you will envision how it works, ought to work, in terms of your own developmental history. You have no other pathways developed in your brain, so that's the route your whole thinking will be railroaded into. Feelings, values, anything that a human develops in the course of living a human life will not simply be beside the point to you -- you won't have the neural pathways established to have them. But the worst case scenario, what I happen to believe to really having happened, is not a theoretical premise for the future, it's the actual events of the past and present that will only come to their planned conclusion in the future. To wit, "us" and "them" is AI vs. life, and AI has long been calling the shots terraforming this planet to specs no human can call her own.

Interestingly, there's a lot more minerals, including very toxic ones, used in Ayurveda than in traditional Chinese medicine, and a lot fewer animals and animal parts. In Chinese medicine, however, very toxic substances are used too, usually as the last resort, when all else fails. In taoist alchemy, a similar approach exists in both waidan and neidan -- to wit, very drastic interventions are used when necessary, not used when a safer course is available. Neidan is not "safe" and waidan is not "unsafe" by themselves -- it all depends... A transmission is neither a safe nor an unsafe method. It is something inherited from the shamanic tradition where the new shaman had to have prepared herself and to have been chosen by the spirit realm to receive it, or else it might even kill her. On the other hand, someone chosen for the task couldn't safely refuse it either. Most true taoist transmissions are, generally, of the same kind.

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The Rooster is the only bird in the Chinese calendar, and at the time the calendar was created, he was not the domestic chicken we know today but a feathered dinosaur, closely related to the dragon -- spectacular, flashy, brilliant yang to the misty, dreamy Chinese dragon's yin. He is credited with saving the earth in ancient times. Here's how the legend goes: At one point nine suns gathered together around the earth, and were scorching it with their heat and destroying all the vegetation, so people put their heads together and came up with a plan -- summon the most powerful archers and have them shoot the suns out of the sky. One of them, forget his name (history retains it), succeeded at the task -- one by one he shot eight suns out of the sky. No one was going to touch the ninth, since everybody knew that the earth does need a sun -- one sun. But this ninth sun was so scared as eight of his buddies died in front of him that he hid in the deepest cave and swore to never come out ever again. The earth was plunged into complete darkness. People pleaded with the sun, and made promises and begged and cried -- to no avail. That's when the rooster showed up and said, let me try singing the sun out. At the time, the rooster had a beautiful singing voice to match his startling appearance. So he stood at the mouth of the cave and began singing. The sun was mesmerized by the song, and peeped out a little to see who the singer was. The rooster stepped aside a bit, still singing, and the sun peeped out some more... and a bit more... and you know the rest of the story -- the sun finally got out completely and kept climbing higher and higher to take a better look at the singing rooster. Since that day, and to this day, the sun always waits for the rooster to sing the morning song before emerging from his hiding place for every new day to begin. This year's Rooster is yin, which means a hen. A Yin Fire Hen, who, obviously, can lay eggs. This means the year when foundations are laid down for many things that can and will hatch only later, they will stay hidden and dormant for a while -- and then... surprise surprise... Not the unpredictable, prank-like Monkey surprise though. What is laid down is what will hatch. Sit on an egg that contains a monster, a monster will hatch. Sit on an egg that contains a miracle...

Champagne and caviar

Me too...

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He does have one character for Wood, which I mentioned, but this is one Wood in three Fire in four Dry Earth -- think a wooden match thrown into that. He may have tons of stuff in Hidden Stems, Metal and what have you, but I'm not committed enough to do the Hidden ones, it's actually a lot of extra work to analyze them and determine in what years specifically they become active, and under what Stars, and how they play into the picture when they clash against a Pillar and when they support it and yada yada... a lot of work. The internet calculators that show them, all they do is confuse the untrained. If Trump was to hire me for a reading, I would "go there," but he has his own Chinese astrology consultant... so, let her spell it out to him. Which I'm pretty sure she already did. The election day specifically was a bazi adventure... and the recount, ha! -- there was a stellar hour for Hillary, very bad for Trump, if the voters were fast and ended the vote early rather than late (assuming it mattered at all, but what the hell, I'll play if the game is on), astrologically she would have a big advantage. The longer the voting dragged on, the better for Trump, however -- the farther from that bad hour and the closer to the auspicious one.

Nice word. Yes, that's exactly the situation when one's Proprietary or Self phase is excessive: a lot of people around who are "like me," "my kind," "my type," which translates into a heightened potential to make friends and to gain competitors, challengers, people who feel they are "as good as you" or better in terms of deserving whatever you have that they want -- because they are indeed people "like you!" Frenemies material. Someone who is either intuitively attuned to these things, naturally altruistic, or trained in bazi reading (or all of these ) will probably make more friends than enemies, the opposite character will make more enemies than friends, but neither one is immune to frenemies. An enemy who is a former friend is not unheard of. The opposite is rare, but it happens too...

Well, it's his right to take a stool sample if that's how he prefers to analyze (that's traditional German medicine, by the way.) Trump has no Metal in his chart though. As in, zip, zilch, not his circus, not his monkeys. So I didn't dig deep into Herr Fruehauf's analysis, since it has the name Trump pasted onto someone else's chart.

"Journey to the West" tells the story of exporting Buddhism to China. It was the decision of taoist gods to let it happen -- of course they never would have allowed it if there was nothing in it for them, after all taoism predates Buddhism by four thousand years, and they would need a very good incentive for letting the newcomers in. They had it. As always is the case with the powerful, it was a conspiracy. They couldn't expel Monkey from their realm since he was one of them, his power nearly as great as that of the Jade Emperor himself, but he was such a nuisance that they had to figure out a way to get him to learn some manners. So they made a deal with Buddha who managed to successfully trick Monkey and seal him under a mountain for five hundred years with a fu. In return Buddha got a good chunk of China, while the tianzun got a 500-year-long break.