Taomeow

People who don't get any real benefits from TM just went for the wrong abbreviation. Transcendental Meditation... The long and pompous name, "transcendental," sounds as though it does begin with a "trance," on top of overselling whatever meditation it offers right off the bat. What's in a name? A sales pitch, in this case. Caveat emptor. Whereas the short, modest TaoMeow that is similarly abbreviated to TM promises nothing and puts no one in a trance (hopefully). What's in a name? A fondness for tao and for cats -- and I'm not selling either. So, choose which TM to trust, but choose wisely... TM

I won’t fall behind you. I’m the guard. You—the prisoner. Our fate is the same. And here in the same open emptiness they command us the same—Go away. So—I lean against nothing. I see it. Let me go, my prisoner, to walk over towards that pine tree. Marina Tsvetaeva, 1916

Priceless!

I was served tea by a practicing taoist traditionalist in China on several occasions. A complete ceremony beginning to end, but with zero attention drawn to it -- we were talking about things completely unrelated to tea. The effortless precision of what he was doing dawned on me only at the third occasion, because at the first two I thought he was being sloppy, spilling water all over the tray, the tea pot, and the tea pet (part of the ceremony, in this case a funny, very conceited-looking yixing clay frog). The spilled water was then being mopped up with a large calligraphy brush and pressed out over some receptacle. By the third ceremony someone explained to me that yixing clay needs to be splashed with water or tea ideally every day, and at least once a week, if it is to last for thousands of years, so he was doing this on purpose. Once I knew, I paid closer attention to his "sloppiness" and saw something else -- a precise hand and a carefree mind. His way of serving tea was similar to his way of playing the guzheng, doing calligraphy, practicing taiji, or sticking needles into patients. Excellent kung fu! I thought the ceremony was very very taoist, though not a word was said about any connections. It was a doing of taoism. My favorite kind. Oh, and the tea was delicious.

How dinosaurs evolved according to an ancient Chinese scripture

I think I was biased in its favor, and read it to the end. Don't know if it's worth it as a good read -- yes the writing is dull, especially considering the subject -- but at the time I was gobbling up everything I could find on the cultures of the Amazon, past and present, and I recall this book only vaguely, with the exception of two memorable points. The DNA connection -- that was right up my alley because I had been shown things that couldn't be mistaken for anything else. (I suspect that at least some of the people who experience "bad nagas" may actually be looking at their DNA damage made perceptible to them in imagery that conveys the danger and the magnitude of the problem. It is a warning from within, externalized by a practice capable of interpreting this danger in such a way that they can understand the image, and of projecting it outward where they can see it. Not that external nasties don't exist. But that's a separate story...) So, this, and tsai yoshto-yoshto, "language twisting-twisting." That was also up my alley, but that's yet another different story. Unlike you, I didn't have any visual or imagined snake experiences -- instead I turned into a whole bunch of snakes. I mean, Kunlun was doing that after a certain point, my whole body would change into snakes changing into lianas changing into the jungle changing into more lianas that extended like cables from the earth to the galaxies. All of it proved real. Long story... And those cats, strange cats, jaguars, snake-cats, dragon-cats -- that was also part of the transformation, and later I was gaping at Maya and Inca art in museums in Lima and recognizing them... And then I saw a painting of the center of the human brain in frontal view that looks like one of those jaguars... There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

Ah well, since we're on that page again... allow me to throw in my own snake. The snake seduced me into going to Peru for shamanic ceremonies. Kunlun was just a middleman. The snake, in the meantime, revealed itself as the DNA, the fundamental tool Mother of the Universe uses to build life. All life everywhere. When I came back, I started looking for books by those who had similar experiences, and found this one: Was grateful for the corroboration -- not that I doubted what Mother of the Universe showed and told me -- incidentally, visions of anacondas and jaguars (a jaguar is a cat-snake of sorts, or a cat-dragon, I've seen one too) are common and ubiquitous among members of indigenous tribes of the Amazon under the influence of ayahuasca, and very rare among Westerners who try the brew. So I figured the role of Kunlun (and some other things I did before with a lot more dedication and for a much longer time) was, in my case, to pave the way to realms of knowledge and comprehension that might have been inaccessible to a civilized woman otherwise. So I was very, very grateful. I never did any Kunlun ever since. It had served its purpose in my case, and then we parted ways. As good friends.

The two comprehensive fundamental works on the subject are Lu Yu's "The Classic of Tea" ( written c.760-780) and Emperor Huizong's "The Treatise on Tea" (written in 1107). I'm not aware of any English translations. I've only read excerpts. Which convinced me that we have no idea what tea is. E.g., a lot of rules concern different kinds of water that should or shouldn't be used to make tea. The best is the water of slow, gentle brooks emerging from deep inside the earth at specific places, the second best is the water of slowly flowing mountain streams, the third... and so on. Water from man-made wells is considered inadequate. Water polluted with chemicals is not mentioned. To say nothing of all the rules for the tea itself. Apparently the right kind had the attention of taoist medicine men and women to a much greater extent than any other herb -- e.g. there's many pages dedicated to tea in the Yellow Emperor's Classic, but only one or two about ginseng. Of course in China they weren't familiar with coffee.

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I've seen a whole bunch of "new members" over the years who show up and make it their earliest contribution to the discussion to attack this or that master, system, or practice. I don't know if there's a method to this, but a pattern, definitely...

Yeah, the competition is real, the reward... 1.2% real. Figures. In Russia, we had gold medals awarded to high school graduates with the perfect score, the highest possible in all subjects. Usually about one student in forty or so would win it at the best schools, perhaps none elsewhere, don't know the exact statistics, only that you had to work your ass off to get it. I am the proud first generation non-winner of that medal, everybody else in the family had it. My parents' medals were about half the size of my husband's, but they did contain real gold, a fair amount of it. The next generation medal, well... we used it to prop the leg of a shaky sofa. Not very respectful, but accurately reflecting the attitude of the winner.

Some things are straightforward. A teacher may say, "you can share this," "you can teach your own students that," and then, about something else, "this is between you and me, please don't share" -- this trust should never be violated, But without such explicit instructions, it depends. I am reading a book titled "Show Your Work!" as we speak. Has to do with the social media age we live in. If you want to succeed with a project, especially a fully creative one, you need an audience. And the author argues that you won't get an audience in this day and age if you don't give them a sneak preview and an idea of who you are and where you get your ideas from. No one listens to just anyone these days merely because they have something to say, there's too much noise. I'm only in the beginning with this book, don't have a definite opinion yet. However, I've a facebook "friend" who is a Russian sci-fi author. Friend of a friend, knew nothing about him, you know how FB "friendships" go. Was skeptical about his writing because on FB he shares only his political opinions. So, at some point, in between political rants, he started posting excerpts from the novel he is currently writing. A couple of pages at a time. Holy shit. This is so cool. So interesting. I can't wait to find out what happens next. So I wound up buying his earlier book. That's what it's about for the author, right? I bought his earlier book -- it's great, and I wouldn't have known anything about it if he didn't "show his work" in real time. Now I can't wait for the one he started sharing! So... it all depends. Listen to your heart and listen, as a few already rightfully pointed out here, to your audience's hearts. And to your teacher's instructions. The rest is a creative project called your life, and you are the queen of that castle. (Or king, as the case may be.)

KISS, people, KISS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

You won't be one of those people who report, late in life, regretting not the things they did but things they didn't do. Me neither. Unless you just got me to regret never having vaulted. What I meant by "sports are off limits to a warrior" is competitive sports -- points and scores and records and beating the other guy/gal for the ego, for profit, or for any of the taoist no-no's (fame-fortune), all that jazz. For fun, for sure. But that's not sports if it's for fun. It's just playing. The way animals play with their bodies and environments and their mates. They either play, or they fight. No sports. Something like that...

Sounds way scary, jb... Do you happen to remember Sergey Bubka? He came from my neck-of-woods and inspired quite a few local guys to expose their where-it-counts to the dangers of the crossbar. He was not only an inspiration, but also probably a birth rate reduction factor for the generation. In high school, the crossbar was a problem for me even in high jump, some ancient instinct impossible to overcome kicked in and I just stopped in front of it, more than half the time. I knew it would fall without hurting me if I don't clear it but my body refused to believe it. Athletically it was not a problem at all (I was the long jump champion), but psychologically... and no one taught us the technique of turning your back to that damn thing when you jump, I'm sure it would have worked for me. Or maybe it would have made things worse. Too late to find out. Sports are off limits to a warrior. (Sometimes to a ridiculous extent. E.g. a guy came to my taiji class who refuses to warm up. His rationale: "I practice for self-defense, and in a situation of self-defense I won't have an opportunity to warm up. I have to know how to do it in an as-is condition." Ridiculous, but I can see his logic... in all its weirdness... )

Really? This thread is back? Butter me on both sides and call me a pancake. But don't call me a daobum. Too embarrassing.

Damn... I'm glad you made it doing that. I have my list of "once and never again" things too. Riding my bicycle downstairs in an apartment building is one. High diving into the sea at night, on a moonless, starless night -- the next day I came back to inspect the spot and discovered that the rocks sticking out from the bottom between which I managed to land were spaced exactly to let my body fit in but not a millimeter wider -- so the wrist watch I was wearing got sliced off my wrist, never to be seen again, but I didn't have a scratch... yet just thinking of the stupidity of the thing I did and realizing what would have happened if I was an inch off to the side... never again. And so on... But the worst injury I ever sustained was from playing hide-and-seek. Don't ask...

I would try anything once except the pole vault.

The last Olympics I watched, I was young enough to have crushes on the stars. I was devastated when a star hockey player who, on top of a warrior physique, had angelic blond hair and an irresistible, brilliant smile, was revealed as having no teeth to call his own. That was the beginning of the season of the falling stars for me. Blessed be the season of the falling stars, because that's when you start doing things you've always wanted to do for which they convinced you you were not qualified because you couldn't be made into a star in those things -- too tall, too short, too slow, too lazy, too impatient, too old, too busy, too this and too that. So, shortly after the last star fell, I learned how to ice skate, windsurf, play tennis and do yoga and taekwondo and then finally taiji which can suffice by itself or be applied to anything else I want to do. There's no stars in taiji, it's not a competitive sport. So it will never damage my teeth unless I get so carried away with its unlimited possibilities of application that I bite some iron man or other. But I don't think I will.

Me too. And these days they are thick enough to isolate my neural dendrites from food discussions, which are usually even more pointless than political and religious combined. But regarding ice cream, I have to tell you how my great-grandmother made it. It was believed to be a summer treat, you didn't eat it until June and you didn't eat it later than September. The milk was at the peak of its fragrance and fat content then because the cows grazed on green pastures instead of eating hay (yes, hay, not corn once the fresh grass was gone, and not soy and not dead cows ground into their feed -- 12% is the FDA standard these days), young grass and especially all those fragrant flowers in the meadows made the milk smell of summer paradise, clover and chicory and camomile and forget-me-nots by the river. So, the cow would be milked and the milk sold that very morning at the market, and my great-grandmother (in a class above keeping her own cows but in a place surrounded by pastures and forests) would get a whole lot, a bucket -- she had seven children looking forward to the treat. Some of those children, including my grandmother who was the youngest, would in the meantime go to the forest and gather a basket or wild strawberries. The milk would be cooled off on ice (they kept huge, thick blocks of ice in the earthen cellar throughout the summer -- the cellar was as cold as a fridge, and the ice worked as the freezer) and the cream would separate, forming a thick cap on top. This would be scooped up into the ice cream maker, the wild strawberries combined with it in abundance, along with some linden honey which was considered quite medicinal and counteracted the coldness of the treat (cold food was approached as very precarious, and no kid with sniffles or the tiniest cough or a sore throat could hope to get any ice cream until a week in the clear.) Then it took a long time for the whole bunch of whoever was interested in ice cream to take turns turning the handle of the manual ice cream maker, which consisted of an inner vehicle for the ice cream and then outer for ice and the outermost for rock salt that provided thermal isolation, I think that was the design. So, it was something you ate only on weekends -- who has the time to make ice cream on busy weekdays? -- and only in season. And my grandmother remembered that treat into her nineties. I'm pretty sure that ice cream was jam-packed with qi.

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CT, thank you! I think I'll explore.

Chi Force, speaking of the South China sea, the disputed islands are not islands to the Philippine side which asserts they are just coral reefs, and they are islands to the Chinese who say they may have been coral reefs "sometime in the past" but they have topsoil with both natural land vegetation and cultivated crops there and therefore are, without a doubt, islands, part of "land." No one smashed them (yet), and yet to the Philippines they didn't, don't, and won't exist. And go to China and a change occurs without any involvement of time and space -- there's islands, they exist -- did, do, and they believe will in the future, exist. Funny how these things work, right? Now back to my main theme -- probability. The probability of the islands existing in the past, present and future fully depends on China's chances (stochastic, probabilistic likelihood, which can take the form of diplomatic, military, economic, power-dictated, secret-conspiratorial, open-defiant, manipulative, reckless, carefully thought through, an "act of god" or of the United States government, etc. etc. etc. -- i.e. the interplay of luck/opportunity and intent/interference I was talking about) to win the dispute. Win the dispute, kaboom -- islands! Islands!! Material space, under cultivation, in time -- has been, is, will be. Lose the dispute -- kaboom! No islands! Fishing grounds in the sea, with some inconsequential coral reefs, who cares about coral reefs in the fishing grounds, it's not like they're islands or anything, there have never been, isn't, nor ever will be any islands in that space at any time. Funny how these things work... awe-inspiring if you take the thought further... and further still...

Change is a function of probability, quite independent of space and time, whereas what we are used to handling as "space and time" are fully dependent on this probability, on the likelihood of the "other" "spacetime" state being "reachable" from a given state. Probability is mother of change and child of luck and intent.

I've never tried it. Is it traditional? And if it is, where? For how long?