Taomeow

@Dawei: Thank you so much! This is very cool! @ Exorcist: Glad to talk with you again too! Yes, that would be awesome. I used to make technical translations for a living, and I would always sit down with an engineer to have the stuff I was to translate explained to me, pick his or her brain regarding the terminology used, and have the thing or process described by the term elucidated. One can't be a specialist in everything-that-is, but knowing a language and teaming up with a specialist who knows the subject wins that battle. OK, let me fess up. My teacher once compared taiji skill of a master to one of those three-legged ding cauldrons -- the three legs being the form, the tuishou, and the weapon. Ding was in use from the Bronze Age and still is today, because it is a kind of thing that is complete and perfect for its purpose -- nothing is excessive and nothing is missing. If any one of its three legs is missing, however, the ding can't stand on its own -- or to get back from the metaphor, the skill is not complete and therefore can't be perfect. But even if all three legs are there yet one or two are shorter, it's shaky and unstable. So, I need to lengthen two of the legs, because my form "leg" is way longer (by years). I don't really need to draw the jian from the back, all I need is practice, there's plenty to work on without getting into any uncharted territory, and yet-- and yet I have a vision-memory-dream, not sure what else to call it, it's not a daydream and not in my head, it's something my body is trying to remember... it's like forgetting how to ride a bicycle and yet knowing what riding a bicycle feels like... so this drawing from the back move is something along these lines, as though something in me knows how to do it but I can't get to it. Weird, huh? Past life? Kung fu movies? Who knows... It itches between my shoulder blades, this unobtainium...

Exorcist, thank you very much! Sounds great. Maybe you could team up with someone experienced in swordsmanship to translate it? In the meantime, I'll check if the text has been translated into Russian.

They killed the prisoner first?.. Well... They (correction: we all) definitely made a lot of progress by the mid-20th century and Unit 731... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 Anyway... didn't mean to derail my own thread. Thanks for the interesting information.

Maybe some modern materials can be used -- some titanium reinforced canvas? The danger is realistic, definitely. I drag all my weapons to practice in a pretty sturdy canvas bag, yet one of them -- I suspect the Longevity Cane though, not the jian in its scabbard -- made a hole in the upper part of the bag, on the side. For a while, incidentally, I found it very convenient for drawing the jian out of the scabbard without opening the bag, until the hole got bigger and the whole thing simply fell out one day when I accidentally turned the bag upside down. I mended the hole with a thick thread, and now it's shaped a particular way, asymmetrically, and there's ideas brewing for the scabbard shaped in a funky way.... reinforced with titanium... LOL. I'm not an engineer, unfortunately, and not much of a seamstress... and don't have any in bondage to order the design... Which reminds me, on a tangent... You know how the Japanese samurai tested his new sword? He would go out, call a random passer-by -- come here -- and lop his head off. Only then would he pay the swordsmith. Or lop his head off, as the case may be.

Leth, great! Thank you very much. I will explore.

Andrei, I was referring to the movie scene. Each weapon has its primary use, that's true, but its range is not limited to that. E.g. I can use the jian for a blunt strike with the handle (against an opponent who's too close, when there's no time to step back, or in a cramped up space, e.g.), for cutting, chopping, slicing, piercing, etc., in pretty much any situation. A jian was a preferred weapon of taoists, who didn't specialize in being warriors in the battlefield. They specialized in being universalists. I practice taiji jian, and one of the things you learn in taiji is to use your environment -- everything in your environment -- to your advantage and not treat anything as an obstacle. It is what it is (pending familiarizing myself with the article referenced by Taoist Texts) -- a technique to find, or a legend of its existence. To be determined. The length in reference to your own arm and the balance point of the jian are crucial, of course. Which is both true and annoying, because I would like to have a folding jian for travel, and a wooden one for practice wherever I want, but none of the ones I tried fit the bill. The wooden ones are off balance all of them, and the folding one... forget it. Easier to use an umbrella.

When I was pregnant, for a couple of weeks in the process I felt like a walking fish tank. The swimming up and down and side to side, sometimes with hovering and then dives, sometimes with sharp turns, was something I felt very distinctly. I don't know if many pregnant women feel it, maybe with twins the waves get amplified. This explains, of course, why infants don't have to learn to swim -- they are born remembering how because they practiced already. My niece was one of the swimming babies, her parents started her "practice" in the bath tub a week after she was born. She grew up as strong as a horse.

In at least some cases, those are prenatal memories. I know that early in the development the fetus doesn't sit inert but swims in the amniotic fluid when it is still small enough to have all that space to move freely.

Something that sheds some light on at least one technique -- though it's not shown: the woman arrives on horseback. It is possible to place the jian anywhere convenient on a horse, so when used in mounted combat it can be drawn immediately. There's a Chinese historical anecdote about an assassination attempt on an emperor. The emperor could not be approached by anyone bearing weapons. The conspirators devised a plan to wrap the sword in a painted scroll presented to him as a gift. At the decisive moment the assassin discovered that he was unable to draw the sword from the rolled scroll in the position in which it was presented -- the sword was too long. The emperor got to rule some more.

Not at all. I was talking to the Great Spirit of California once. I was in the mood, in nature, so I made a speech. Gratitude, appreciation, yada yada. The Great Spirit of California, just that once, responded. And here's what it had to say: "Why are you dumbing yourself down when talking to me? Why are you using generic phrases and trite expressions picked up from dumb uneducated phonies who just copy each other's nauseatingly cloying style? Why are you talking to me as though I'm retarded, as though I'm simple, as though I'm a child who doesn't understand anything complex? Why do you think my intelligence is at a level you need to crawl down to from who you are in order to meet? You are a poet and an intellectual. Talk to me like yourself, like your best, most talented self. Talk to me like you talk to your superior whom you hope to impress with your brilliance, not depress with your fake humility. Remember what a woman of power once said? -- don't be humble, you're not that great. Give it all you've got, or get lost." I was in shock... I now address "other realms" in a different manner altogether. I write my messages to entities and spirits of greatness in rhymed poetry in my native tongue and polish them as though I'm going to address them to an editor and it's a literary submission. I make jokes hoping to crack them up, and make sure these jokes are spontaneous and funny, not pathetic. I know they know I have a sense of humor, and I know a pathetic joke will anger them because I can do better, but a solemn air of someone humorless will anger them even more, because it's not authentic. I know they have my number, and I now know how much they despise "generic spirituality."

Definitely has something to do with the light jin in my case. I never had any flying dreams before -- just this one, recently, when I was specifically spending some time on the Double Jump Kick in Chen laojia (in my waking life) trying to get to that suspended/levitating state that requires stepping on air as though it's a staircase. The dream was brief. I found myself jumping so high that I could see the curvature of the round sky, and looking at a mountaintop from above. I saw the figures of two walking humans who had just made it to the summit. I couldn't see who they were but had a sense they were a man and a woman. The mountain was covered with snow, and the sky curving all around it was a milky wintery blue. A voice inside my mind's ear said loud and clear, "On top of the world." That was it. I think I mentioned before, in some dream thread or other, that I have three kinds of dreams: the no-dream dark dream that feels nurturing and recharging and produces no images -- these are my default dreams, but it's not a "no dreams" state (I remember the difference), I do dream that I'm in that dark recharging place, and deliberately stay there. Then there's mundane dreams -- I get them very rarely. And dream-visions -- these are the rarest (a few years apart) and have a real-life-event impact, they change my perceptions, they are like an education to get, what you do with your education is an unknown but you've graduated from some program or other and know what the program was... then you either apply what you've learned, or not. So, this one was one of the dream-visions.

Many thanks for the responses. A&P, cool! I'll watch your videos a bit later, got some stuff lined up... Will report back. Daeluin, as usual, thank you for your thoughts. My jian is actually etched with a name that means Dragon Well... It's funny that when I started practicing, I decided to name the sword and choose a name that means "metal producing water" but sounds a bit more poetic than that. Got the name, told my teacher, he goes, no, that's the name of an acupuncture point on the sole of your foot... well, I knew that, but I thought, why not, Bubbling Well can mean what I wanted it to mean too and the point still refers to Water, Kidneys meridian, right? No, not right. This is a weapon, you need to honor its nature... Fine. Dragon Well works both ways. Taoist Texts -- you are amazing. They say there's three kinds of wisdom -- knowing, knowing where to look, and knowing who to ask where to look. You possess all three! Deep bow.

White cat... here kitty kitty... Apech... come here... there's a nice plump Egyptian mouse to catch...

Words... Would be easier if the same words meant the same things to different people. I remember being thoroughly confused as a little girl when my grandmother would ask me, e.g., "Have you seen my yellow handbag?" She didn't live in a state of abundance where you don't know how many material possessions you possess and what exactly they are and their exact whereabouts at any given time, so I knew with utmost precision that my grandmother didn't own a yellow handbag. I knew she had a black one for "going out" and a brown one for everyday use. There was no yellow handbag in existence. I thought she was imagining having one, dreaming of it, or worse, because this "where's my yellow handbag" quest was repeated with some regularity and she would get annoyed at me for not helping her find it. Then one day the mystery of the yellow handbag was solved. "There it is!" my grandmother proclaimed as she grabbed her brown handbag. She made no distinction between the color brown and the color yellow --- moreover, turned out she called all mustard shades and khaki and beige and chocolate colors "yellow," but she wasn't color blind, she just didn't care enough for the distinctions, it was unimportant in her world. I think the difference between concentration and awareness becomes pretty clear in taiji, which some people call a "moving meditation" but no one, to my knowledge, calls a "moving hypnosis." Concentration is what you have lost when you screw up a move and realize that the reason you did is that your mind had just taken a brief departure from what your body is doing. And awareness is what you gain if you manage not to lose concentration for a few years.

We needed a tiger here. We're overrun by cats.

For fluid time management, I favor cognac. Everything else has its time and place, and at other times is out of place. Cognac, however, shines in the morning coffee (just a teaspoon, no more) and is the answer to the late-at-night question -- "what can I have a sip of now that it's too late for coffee and even tea," it cures colds and warms up conversations, and can't be overdone -- there's no cognac alcoholics, except maybe among the wealthiest 1%, most of whom are not sophisticated enough for that even if they can afford it.

I don't have enough information one way or the other. If you mean the fact that you're older than 60 and alive, that's pretty normal, and I happen to believe that any death and/or loss of health before the age of 120 is what's abnormal. An inspiring French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment ( 21 February 1875 – 4 August 1997), took up fencing at the age of 85, continued to ride her bicycle till her 100th birthday, and lived on her own till she was 110. I think that's pretty normal for a woman who drinks port wine every day and eats a kilogram of chocolate every week for most of her 122 years of life. However, my taoist teacher's teacher Zhang Hedao lived among mortals till the age of 119, and his other teacher, Wang Zhaoming, is still alive at 118, even though they did nothing of the kind. I don't particularly care for chocolate or port wine, so I lean toward the taoist option. But to each their own.

Tools work. Extracting a tooth is possible with or without anesthesia, and anesthesia can be chemical or hypnotic, but the dentist can't pull the tooth with either -- he needs a different tool for this. I had a most enlightened experience under the influence of general anesthesia (no, not for a tooth), but when I came out of it, turned out six people were holding down my body which was trying to run away. In this case the divorce between the body and the mind was complete (near-death). Dental anesthesia under hypnosis leaves you with a similar pocket of unconsciousness, albeit much smaller. So does a hypnotic solution of any problem, physical, psychological, or metaphysical. I relived the anesthesia episode twenty years later in the setting of a deep-feeling body-inclusive therapy, and restored the consciousness by connecting the body and the mind that were still in a state of non-communicating while the real actual experience was ruling from the unconscious instead of miraculously making the experience into something not having happened. That's the problem with manipulating reality by any methods -- if complete reality of everything going on in the moment is either unacceptable or inaccessible to consciousness, it still does not disappear, it's still part of what really happened to you, and it resides in your unconscious from then on -- and, unless extracted thence and reconnected to your overall consciousness, bosses you around in attempts to accomplish that, because that's the nature of consciousness. It always shoots for being whole and knowing itself, by hook or by crook. There's tools that can make it possible for one fragment to suppress and subjugate another -- e.g. for the decision-making neocortex, or the pain centers of the brain, to overrule the limbic system or the amygdala -- to establish a hierarchy of consciousness, choose what it will accept and what it will reject, and sacrifice another fragment into oblivion toward some goal or other -- e.g. the goal of solving a problem, of avoiding pain, or of gaining enlightenment which is what the neocortex may have come to "believe in" without consulting with other parts of you and effectively telling them to shut up. The problem with such tools is, nothing ever shuts up, it just goes underground and starts a guerilla war to regain its rightful throne, its place in your consciousness of "what really happened." What really happened in the case of a hypnotic suggestion is exactly this -- a hypnotic suggestion. As Sirhan Sirhan, who, rumor has it, assassinated Robert Kennedy as an outcome of mind-control manipulations he had been subjected to, put it seconds after pulling the trigger, "What happened? Did I do it? Am I the one who did it?" Yes and no...

I happen to know what this block is and how it is constructed. Of course failing to interest you in that is not the fault of its sublime design, nor mine. Perhaps just a lack of exposure. I am sure that you would be in as much awe if you were to learn what it's all about as I was when I first ran into classical Xuan Kong (spacetime) feng shui which spelled it out for me. This block of 60 (which of course I use every time when charting a bazi reading) has as much relevance for the human life span as the blocks of 12 and 10, of 32 and 64, of 72 and 108, of 20 and 20,000, and so on, and nothing whatsoever to do with urban or rural legends. We are dealing with energies of the world when we refer to the block of 60. Not with what a peasant put to backbreaking work in the rice field has reasonably come to believe about his life expectancy.

60 years is indeed a cycle in Chinese cyclical timekeeping, but not the human life span, of course, and certainly not a cycle of life and death. It's merely the cycle the Ten Heavenly Stems and the Twelve Earthly branches take to return to the initial configuration and start the transitions of the heavenly qi interacting with the earthly qi from a locally (sic) similar (though never identical) point in "time" -- which ("time" that is) of course is completely superfluous in this system, since it stands for a particular configuration of qi and is only meaningful as a label used for convenience (much like you might label a drawer "wires and cables" and a jar, "basmati rice" -- so you know what's there. But having or not having the label does not affect the contents of the drawer or the jar in the least). The real meaningful picture requires a much more detailed assessment of this configuration than a time-label like "end of the 3rd lunar month" or "the year of the Metal Rat" or "the hour of the Monkey." To say nothing of the Gregorian labels for time that actually mean nothing at all in terms of what patterns and configuration of the energies of the world they stand for. All we have is Zhuangzi's "three in the morning," but don't let me digress further, or rather, farther. The human life span, a function of many factors (not just biology), is rather debatable, but leading geneticists tend to believe that "normal" is 120, with a few examples (open to refutation or else presented to the public as such) of much longer spans and a few well-documented proven ones of slightly longer ones. Our DNA is designed to give us 120 under average normal conditions, more than that under certain special conditions (e.g. if we manage to engage our telomerase in adding telomeres to normal cells instead of cancer cells, or if we boost our superoxide dismutase by, e.g., going on a diet that either supplies dietary SOD -- that would be organ meats, e.g. -- or else curbs the overexpression of SOD reductase -- that's likely to have to be grain free. And so on.) But that's what we can pull off under "normal natural" conditions. Outside those parameters and configurations, it starts shrinking of course, like anything that you design for specific conditions of optimal functioning and then run under entirely different conditions.

I agree that both are tools, and would like to point out in brackets that meditation is often misunderstood as some kind of a "goal" state or skill, which it is not. But different tools are suited for different purposes, and a hammer is a useful tool and so is a toothbrush, but one needs to know when to use which. Hypnosis is a tool of manipulation, the deep trance is like a sledgehammer to a shallow trance's hammer. Meditation is a tool of transportation. You don't build or destroy the car you're driving while you're driving it. Not a car, actually, I have always liked the shamanic (and early taoist) definition of the meditative state as a "horse." It is a means of transporting your consciousness somewhere where it can't get without such carrier, or maybe it can but it would take a lot longer and, besides, the horse knows the road, which you might not. Hypnosis is different. It may be a good thing to mend a hole with hypnosis -- but you never know why the hole is there in the first place and what exactly went missing that resulted in a hole. In meditation you may or may not mend it, but you know that, e.g., a hole is where your peace (or piece) of mind should be, but don't rush to stick a piece of toilet paper in the hole to cover it up. For one thing, it might hold for a while but if a strong wind blows, it will fly out. For another, it does not belong. It is not part of the structure in which a hole appeared. It is part of what something or someone not organic to your consciousness had handy, and used. Could be a piece of cement repairing a hole in a delicate rice paper screen -- and then later the whole screen might collapse under the weight. It might have been better off with the hole... I gained my understanding of hypnosis that is along these lines long before I ever meditated. I had a close friend who was a psychiatrist trained in hypnotherapy. She told me that hypnosis can be very efficient but she didn't want to use it after she understood that it is an intrusion into consciousness with not enough information about what it is you're intruding upon. She went as far as to make parallels between hypnosis and rape. The technique is not what makes sex and rape different -- nor is the depth of penetration. It's something else that makes them different. The overall context.

You can hypnotize someone else or be hypnotized by someone else. You can't meditate someone else or be meditated by someone else. Interestingly, this "someone else" holds true even if you're hypnotizing yourself vs. meditating yourself. These are different grammatical structures, of course, as revealed by transformational grammar. In the first case -- "I hypnotize (act upon) myself" -- your "self" is the object being acted upon by the subject, "I," a separate and different entity. In the second, "I mediate (by) myself" or "I, myself, meditate" -- you= yourself meditate -- "I" and "myself" are one and the same entity, the object of the action, the doer. In other words, hypnosis splits/fragments consciousness, while meditation mends the split and unifies consciousness. The technique matters not. The difference is quite beyond technique, and as usual depends on the "know thyself" prerequisite. You can hypnotize or be hypnotized without knowing yourself. You can't meditate without knowing yourself, because there's no one to perform the act unless you are identical with your "self." Which is why I believe meditation is a pretty rare phenomenon, while self-hypnosis is what's mistaken for it in many, many cases.

I thought it was a secret! I thought the master revealed it only to me!!....ow!!!