Taomeow

You have a point. The name is important, and if the acronym invites sarcastic distortions, it's bad juju. Let's find a better name, I'm open.

LL, they are both water under the bridge. If you and everybody else liked Trump, or Hillary, or Bernie (it was my impression most people liked Bernie, and against Trump he was leading in the double digits, so why... but nevermind... water under the bridge) -- if we already had the man or the woman to make everyone happy, from either party, I wouldn't propose a new one. I propose it as my reaction to massive profound unhappiness of about half the population with what we got, and a reasonable expectation of equally profound unhappiness of the other half if the elections were to end in the opposite scenario. I propose that whatever divided the country like that was not natural intelligence. It was artificial intelligence, or natural stupidity, or both. I had a pair of flip-flops, made (beautifully, by artisans) in a foreign country (I won't tell which in these sensitive times). I wore them for three years, eight months a year, this is So Cal, I live near the ocean, so... my number one go-to footwear. They still looked great on top, but the soles were wearing thin. I started looking for another pair just like this one to replace them. I couldn't find it. Not even close. Another year went by. My big toe is now touching the ground if I wear them, the sole is just gone from under it. Realizing that I'd started avoiding people I know when I'm wearing them, I finally bought a new pair. No comparison. Profoundly inferior. But what could I do? It was either that or go barefoot. A compromise. Now imagine that instead of this, I had the power to strip the whole continent of asphalt and concrete and regrow the lush grasses that covered every inch of it from sea to shining sea when it was first... er... discovered. It would mean that here in SoCal I would indeed go barefoot eight months out of the year. Worth it? Or do I keep buying new flip-flops, made in a foreign country by 11-year-old girls working 16-hour-long shifts, looking like semi-drowned kittens? For most people, the answer is obvious. Drown them completely. And mechanize the shoemaking completely. The difference between Hillary and Trump in this context? None. Join the NIP!

Thank you. Don't just love them. Join the party!

RC,

To the President-elect by Joseph Brodsky (a Nobel Prize winner) You’ve climbed the mountain. At its top, the mountain and the climbing stop. A peak is where the climber finds his biggest step is not mankind’s. Proud of your stamina and craft you stand there being photographed transfixed between nowhere-to-go and us who give you vertigo. Well, strike your tent and have your lunch before you stir an avalanche of brand-new taxes whose each cent will mark the speed of your descent. [1992]

"knowing our duty as both master and slave." This leaves out in the cold weirdos like me who hate the master-slave relationships in all their evil manifestations. Weirdos with visceral memory of a world not pressed down upon by a pyramid of power. Everything in our history is post-traumatic memory loss. I feel the trauma very acutely, somehow my system failed to repress it, I even have a scientifically researched theory of how this may have happened. And the payoff for this rare and weird form of suffering, the what's bought at this price that many (most?) might find too high, is memory I didn't lose. I remember the world without slaves and masters. I pine for it every day. It was real. Way more real than anything that has happened since.

Why would he use the Loa? He used Chinese astrology. He hires top feng shui masters.

I like this part! Yes, exactly, prayer is about instant gratification, and occasionally, we get that. Occasionally. Not on every single occasion. Not always as gratifying as we expected it to be. I think it's a case of "be careful what you wish for" which some people need to learn via direct experience or they won't believe that something may be wrong with "I want it all and I want it now." It seems so right after all. And if our prayers are answered, our faith is reinforced. And if they are not answered, it is either shaken or rationalized. None of it happens in meditation. You are establishing a relationship with yourself, not with some wish-granting entity somewhere high up there. A relationship with oneself is tricky, because it is so much more difficult to fantasize about yourself than about god in heaven. You just know yourself too well... including the fact that you don't really know who you are. You know that you don't know, right?.. It's easier to rely on someone else's mind than to develop your own. Heart, spirit, same deal. Yours are your work station, and if you pray, i.e. call on someone else to do your work for you... well, then they will take all the credit, and what have you done? Whined and begged and made promises like a good little boy who wants candy. OK, the adult gave you some this time. Praise the lord! But it's still in his power to not give it to you the next time, decide you've been naughty, smack you, send you to your room, do whatever he likes with you. Very tempting for little kids who are terrified of growing up more than of anything else. Familiar, and comforting in its familiarity. No venturing where they haven't been yet, into adulthood. Just find a big daddy in heaven and you don't have to grow up, don't have to be courageous enough to find out who you are when you grow up. Churches of the world are full of those charming little kids, some of them ninety years old.

The best thing is still the poem, but of course Brodsky's image of a mountain to climb to the top can't be anything but a pyramid. The pyramid is the graphic representation of the structure of hierarchical power in a world saddled with "rulers." The people are the base of the pyramid -- wide, low, pressed upon by the whole mass of the whole thing over it. The higher you go, the fewer are there, the less pressure on you from the top, the more you press on the bottom. The pyramid on our dollar bill is truncated though, which is a far more accurate image of our system. It does not have one peak, rather it has two corners. to represent the two-party system. A democracy is in fact the next step after tyranny, an advanced and more stable form of oppression. You can walk forever from one of its topmost corners to the other, fluctuating between them on a horizontal line connecting them into one unit while creating the illusion of two units, of a choice, of one corner of the truncated thing being better now, then the other one being better, then the previous one again, and so on. The dichotomy thus represented is really advanced monopoly, and the party is still one -- the political party, with its top position and its monopoly on power. Of course it's not the placeholder, not the man or woman in a particular corner of it at a particular 4-year period, who concentrates the whole political power of that layer. Rather, he or she is the member of that political party layer in the most precarious position, hanging on the edge, the purposeful placement in a spot of no stability stipulated by its short term. The monopoly that is the capstone, missing and unknown, is still implied by the image, but what it is made of -- the Deep State, the Shadow government, or the AI or some other archons calling the real shots -- is unknowable, yet it is a very inevitable continuation of the truncated pyramid into the highermost, invisible spheres. I tend to think that the Deep State and the Shadow government are not what's there, rather they are located on that stable, unchalleangeable from below, horizontal line between the two corners, with this or that president hanging off that cliff for four or eight years before climbing safely back onto the plane. (With the exception of those presidents who imagined they have real power in that corner and tried to shake things up. Those are pushed off that edge promptly.) The current Deep State is formidable, a corporate-military-banking-bureacratic plane that can't possibly be affected by any movement of the base or any contortions on the party edge. What the mysterious monoruler at the very peak is up to I don't know, and find those who think they do laughable... all I understand from the picture (and I've studied sacred geometry for many years) is, unless someone from outside the pyramid knocks him off, I don't expect to see anything we haven't seen since the first pyramid was built to deface the face of this planet.

First day of Winter in the Chinese calendar. I start my 72-day Winter meditation today. Even though it's 72 degrees outside. Well, what can you do, winter is winter in the Chinese calendar but here in SoCal we only get the "not summer," and not even that is reliable -- the forecast for Wednesday, November 9th, is 91 degrees. Perhaps they have planned a heat wave for the day after the elections.

They are cunning. They may be training beastly supersoldiers in secret, and when a whole division of those tanks shows up on the battlefield, the enemies die laughing.

This cat must have served his country in his previous life

The man in the moom is fake, like the rest of it. Lady Chang-O laughs. Lady Chang-O laughs in her cinnamon palace, rabbit by her side.

Earth's neural network transmitting to galaxies: mayday, mayday, help!..

I envision it as something like this:

I think I have two possible explanations for uranium's weird behavior. 1) Uranium is prone to stage fright. That's essentially what everybody is saying who tries to interpret its reaction to being observed. I think it's a case of anthropomorphizing something that is not exactly asking for it. And 2) Observation is a qi phenomenon. This one is what I am convinced is the real explanation, but unfortunately, our physicists don't deal in qi. They deal in energy. However, observation is meaningful in a way quite invariant to the energy exerted on the act and to the organs or tools employed. What is perceived by the object under observation is a meaningful change of pattern. The way a meaningful change of pattern is perceived, registered, and responded to is a big unknown to our science, even though it is very obvious that such responses are ubiquitous. On the macro level, things don't have to be "conscious" in the sense we put in this term (anthropomorphizing consciousness, of course) in order to respond to a change of pattern by a change of behavior. A seed in the soil will wake up and sprout in response to a meaningful change of pattern in the environment. Look at it under the microscope and you will see such response in every cell. Where does it end? Take a more powerful microscope, look at the molecules comprising the cell -- the response is still there. Take a stronger one, look at the atoms comprising the molecules -- did we run out of changes? No, we have run out of our power to interpret them, we have run out of our power of integration of the information we are getting. We are getting biophysics, but there's a disconnect between the "bio" and "physics" parts of our comprehension. We don't cross that abyss, don't fill that gap, for fear that we will be accused of filling it with metaphysics. Our biologists and physicist alike have been trained to recoil in horror from that abyss. When a friend of mine came running to his biology professor, a Nobel prize winner, screaming questions that shattered his scientific mind, the professor told him, with this, go talk to a priest, my science ends where these questions begin. Observation is a qi phenomenon. Being observed is perceived by whatever is being observed. No energy exchange has to happen for this to happen. It happens because there's a qi transformation taking place. And there's nothing in existence that's not sensitive to that. How sensitive, and how demonstrable this sensitivity, and how readily different phenomena demonstrate it to us is only relevant if the basic fact is grasped. Everything is sensitive to qi, i.e. to meaningful pattern transformations. Everything in a different way. There's no hiding that you're observing something. If you want to know how it will respond, find out, by observing. Don't freak out if you find out that you pretended you didn't observe and it still "somehow" knew you did. There's phenomena that know. Some will ignore it and some won't. It's normal. Qi of everything is different from qi of everything else. "Blowing on ten thousand things in ten thousand different ways so each can be itself." -- Zhuangzi

A new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forest will echo...

Invoking Bù Dòng, the God of Wrath (god's wrath had to be outsourced to India by both taoists and zen buddhists, for specifically this kind of occasions), and offering the article to his scrutiny.

The Urban legend. If anything, it should prevent them. The real danger is in doing it incorrectly and hurting the knees. The squat must be done as the outcome of elongating the spine, not stretching out the ligaments in the knees. The same rule that is used in taiji applies here: the knees must not go past the toes. This kind of squat, with your butt no more than an inch off the ground, is pretty easy for me, but I practice a difficult one too, which I was taught by one of master Wang Liping's instructors. You squat in the horseback riding stance, going down and up with your spine absolutely straight, not sticking out the butt but pointing the tailbone straight down. Palms together, pointing upward. The instructor told me to aim to meditate in this position. Well... no. No way. Unless a one minute meditation counts. At one point, I was doing it at the beach and some guy saw me from far away and came running to ask me what it was that I was doing. Turned out he was a Krav Maga practitioner, and could tell that I was doing something pretty difficult. People who don't practice anything never seemed impressed by this move even though I do it every time as a warm-up for my walking qigong on the beach.

The Chinese picture shows someone squatting who can't squat, he's perching too high! I guess one would have to practice on solid ground first, and then your squat is so low you can't miss, the bum is not hovering over the target, it's right on target. Incidentally, this is the cure for many gut problems too, because all the acupoints for the stomach are located in the middle of the foot and the rim under your body weight provides acupressure stimulation of these points, but even more importantly, the sitting position bends the intestines so you have to work against resistance. I've always marveled at people who. e.g., read books or, these days, probably use their smartphones or laptops sitting on the john -- how much time do they need? The squat gives no time at all for any unrelated activities.

I thought so! This information comes from one of my Russian herbal encyclopedias (I have three), and the authors merely state that beet juice will cause intolerance and eventually total inability to drink it if consumed right away, and that when it stands in an open container for a while, at least an hour, some unwanted components will get removed (probably degraded by oxygen, and maybe light exposure, and maybe some of them are volatile too) and it will be safe and healthy to drink. I don't think it's oxalic acid though, It appears to be pretty stable and, in doses you get from the juice, very useful. It is toxic primarily to cancer cells, not to healthy cells (unless perhaps you overdo it by juicing, like, ten pounds of beets in one day.) Which is why many folk and naturopathic traditions include beet juice in their anticancer protocols. Beet juice is very helpful in many conditions, it can cure anemia if taken daily for at least a month, it slowly dissolves gallstones (with oxalic acid my guess would be... takes its time, up to six months, but removes them painlessly and radically), so with the above precaution, you can probably try to reintroduce it. After many years in the trenches, I believe that any problems with the bowels need to be addressed by trying a strict gluten-free diet first, and if that doesn't work, also eliminating all dairy, and if that doesn't do the job, only then investigate further. Juicing is nice, but if there's a sensitivity to gluten (95% of all cases go undiagnosed, since current diagnostic tools catch it only when there's already necrotic processes taking place in the gut), it won't help much. I am a big fan of green juices, but in season. Winter is not the season for this, even in California. In winter, I go for soups...

Sorry to repeat myself, I don't always remember what I said where to whom, but I always remember what I believe to be true. This is a fractal trait, self-similarity, tao mao fa ziran. Taomeow patterns herself on herself. As for the squat with weights... um, I don't know anything about that, but since bums have already been amply discussed, especially ample bums, I will take them further. The best training for the squat is the habit of squatting on the toilet, feet on the rim. I may have mentioned this before too, if not, here it is. I'm told that it's hard for people who have never done it, and they use some training device, a step or something, for the learning stage. The benefit of practicing the squat this way is that you will practice every day.

@dusty: Well, yes, it is normal to be sexually attracted to a woman who is ready for both, procreational sex and pregnancy, to notice the markers, and to treat girls who don't have those signs as "daughters" and "nieces" and "sisters." It also used to be natural, apparently, to treat signs of aging in women as markers of readiness for cultivational sex rather than procreational sex, though I doubt that these markers were entirely physical -- after all as a species we didn't differ then from what we are now, and we always had a brain. (At least until very recently...) All taoist arts of the bedchamber (the real deal, not Mantak Chia's sexual constipation practices) are based on the premise that sex is way more than procreation and pleasure, it's a direct unbroken connection to the source of life itself, and like any high level practice, takes time and experience to fully master. I believe they come from that faraway prehistory -- of which we know so little and have been told so many lies so often by people who pose as experts without any merit, just based on their penchant for extrapolating how THEY would fare under those circumstances. That's why they portray our ancestors as clumsy and accident-prone and generally at the mercy of everything -- the elements, the beasts, "struggle for survival," what not. Then they dig up a skeleton of quite possibly a centenarian and assert that our ancestors lived short lives because to them this skeleton looks like that of a modern 20-year-old -- no arthritis, no osteoporosis... they determine lifespans by the amount of accumulated bone degradation, they have no other measuring tool for this. And it doesn't occur to them that a human born and raised into health and never stunted from reaching peak abilities of the body and mind (there was nothing to take away from these and everything to let them fully unfold) was a creature not only very sturdy but in fact formidably strong and powerful. And long lifespans were necessary because grandparents were prominently active in child-rearing... and frail, stupid old men and women is a modern civilized phenomenon -- people used to grow wise and competent with age, not senile... ...but I digress too far.

I can't be the judge of what men find sexually attractive naturally, except indirectly, but I do notice that in modern times, they have been trained in what to find sexually attractive, offered countless "models" (images, "stars," prepackaged products they were sold under the product description "sexy woman") of what a woman is like who is sexually desirable. At the same time they were not exposed to much natural developmental interactions that could prepare the boy to discern what he really needs. Our society has shut down all venues for human closeness except sexual, but since we need a helluva lot more than that, every need that went unmet got sexualized. This makes it acceptable to have the need for physical intimacy, for the warmth and presence and reliability and support of another human body satisfied via sex or pursuit of sex, and nothing else. It has to be sexual or it is not acceptable in our set-up, and when any kind of human intimacy and closeness happens, it is interpreted as sexual because everything else has been shut down at the source. In the original human setting, before "civilization," no, the ability to bear children was not the main sexual attraction, because it was pretty ubiquitous -- any young healthy woman is extremely, extremely fertile, as those who have been on a quest for safe and reliable contraception are finding even today, let alone when we lived in pristine environments. There's some evidence that the highest prize was the woman's ability to teach (to sexually engage in something a bit like a master-student relationship -- or a lot), and teenage boys competed for the sexual attention of crones, while young women were quite easily available and having sex with them was not competed for. That's because paternity was a moot point altogether, since the whole tribe raised the child anyway. So seeking out to preserve the "bloodline" is only something that became a motivator once certain "bloodlines" got this idea of setting themselves apart (or were apart from the start, who knows) -- but early indigenous tribes didn't even know that the father has something to do with conception, or if they knew, they didn't care. This is what the paleolithic and neolithic "sex symbol" looked like -- hundreds of statuettes found all over the world dating back to our earliest history depict her this way for tens of thousands of years, without any major change to the image of Mother Goddess: http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/earthmother.htm

_/\_ Mods: still hard to moderate this topic?