Taomeow

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Nature's wind-up clocks... Walking in the snow, I crushed so many of them.

No, from your gaslamping me in several theads. AND in the last post above too. I think this is a bow-out for me. (Look up the term and the tactic it refers to if it's too American to be readily recognized in Australia.)

No, not debate, the dismissive tone -- that is personal, and I don't "take it personally" in the sense that you succeeded in "hurting my feelings," I take it as a manifest sign of intended disrespect -- the name of the game is awareness. I'm aware when I get undeserved condescention, doesn't mean I pull my hair out in despair when I do, but I see no reason to pretend (as the netiquette seems to have devolved to require) that I don't notice. I notice, and have no problem pointing out that I don't like it. Hope this helps.

Outside my window a jellyfish in the sky reminds me of home

I know it's a disappointment for you but I don't look at your evidence because you never look at mine... e.g., you refused to watch a video I posted in this thread on the basis of it being "too long," remember?.. What goes around comes around... your posts with your evidence are too long, and harder on the eyes than watching a movie, so -- an eye for an eye saved some eyestrain. As for your amusing belief that you know what I, me, believe in ("these things," right? "Fringe" all of them, correct?), what can I say... Man... you have no idea. I did buy a book about Atlantis not so long ago, but didn't get around to reading it yet -- I need to though, I need Atlantis for my sci-fi novel, and Mu too. Mu I am quite familiar with, having read James Churchward's classic. But Atlantis is a bit of a blank spot, so I intend to educate myself. No, I can't just take your word for Atlantisn't, what would I tell my protagonist who had such a hard time figuring out where he was to begin with?.. That he's hallucinated the whole world he's been thrown into? He will just slam the door and walk out on me. I need to give him some solid ground under his GI boots. OK, now the spirit moves me to share some of the things I really believe in with you that are pretty far out. Just a few, to give you a taste. I believe the moon is made of cheese. I believe the fusion of Chromosome 2 speaks very loudly about our history. I also believe no one wants to hear what it says. I believe online forums are there to foster the spirit of camaraderie, for people to enjoy each other's virtual company. Once too many stop using them in this manner and instead start resorting to chronic ongoing repetitive passive-aggressive assaults, perhaps for the purpose of propping up whatever is drooping in themselves by bending down someone else, it's time to move on.

Good grief... the orthodoxy accepted then debunked yet another theory. QED. How is it not their (and their acolytes') standard modus operandi? This is precisely the point I keep making. We have no history the science. We have a collection of orthodox narratives (comprising a body of beliefs, manipulations and agendas, not facts) that get debunked from time to time and replaced by a new set of orthodoxies. And all of it is arbitrary and based on interpretations, falsifications, and confabulations. And yet "everybody knows" is unimpeachable. Even though it is based on phoney baloney -- e.g. about the carbon dating... Did you know you can't carbon date any historic building or monument?.. You can only carbon date organic matter littering the site, cultural layers -- should you find any. The problem with these is, they are often thoroughly intermixed both in the soil (the older the site, the more thoroughly) and in the minds of the interpreting parties... ...anyway, this is just in passing -- you are kindly referred to my "Not doing any homework to prove anything to anybody" tread in WeiWuWei.

This is an oldish thread so the person you asked may or may not answer, but the effects he describes are of "surface yang." A bland Ayurvedic diet is quite yin, and can "push" excessive yang from deeper in the body out to the surface and expel it. Which is why in Ayurveda it is prescribed for all manner of inflammatory disorders. The typical dish that is used for this therapeutic purpose is kicharee. It is usually administered as a monodiet (you don't eat anything else), in most cases for no longer than two weeks to a month. If it's working, the condition will improve or resolve by the end of this period. It is not eaten on a regular basis except by yogis and monks who practice other austerities as part of their overall regimen. Mood-wise, this can help, e.g., with manic states, agitated anxiety, etc.. It can, however, exacerbate depression, apathy, "loss of appetite for life" and the like. Proceed with caution.

Yes, nothing is fully "disconnected" -- it's a matter of degrees. Take your metaphor of the umbilical cord, e.g., into real-life context. In the Western medical tradition it is cut immediately, as soon as the baby is born. In the tribal cultures still adhering to the traditional way (vanishingly few of them), it is never cut. It gradually dries up -- takes about a week -- and falls off, or is broken off by hand like a dry twig when it's already completed its purpose. The implications of the difference in these practices are vast. The tribes that don't cut the cord seem to "not cut the cord" to all of their ancestry -- perhaps all the way to tao, who knows. An individual's developmental history thus embodies (not as an idea in the head, but as a knowledge in the very cells of the body, nerves, muscles, blood) the timing for the connection to be strong, to be weak, to be just a memory -- but they are never cut off abruptly from the memory of where they come from. So they remember who they are a lot better. The term used by an African tribe (e.g.) that practices this non-forceful physical disconnection that does not sever the spiritual-somatosensory connection is M'boga, "ancestors, the unbroken connection of 'me the effect' to 'them the cause.' " So the first reaction of a member of this tribe pondering the Western ways is to ask, "Why are you so disrespectful to your M'boga?.." (I know why. Because our M'boga screwed up something horrible. Also because this-here culture is shaped by Hollywood, not by traditional wisdom, and Hollywood hasn't offered a single movie in many decades where a mother was present and good. She is either evil, ridiculous, clueless, inadequate, heartless, dumb, meddling, you name it -- or if she's good and loving, she isn't there, she's dead, replaced by the evil stepmother, like in all those "for children" brainwashes known as fairy tales. Started long before Hollywood though -- the grim Grimm brothers et al... Our idea of the mother figure -- our culture's blueprint for how to relate to her and how to be her.) So, taoists who are into philosophy (I'm not one of them) could answer your question better, or at least more philosophically, abstractly, than I can. My take is, it doesn't matter until it is practiced. Does not matter what we "think" about "we're all one" or "eternal infinite unchanging" or tao or any of that. Timing is everything. A baby cut away and carried away from the mother does not know any of that. She only knows what she is living right now -- that she is hurt, alone, and unloved. The world takes it from there. Philosophy that comes later can't mend it. The only way to mend it is to embody tao to your own child -- but no one can who doesn't have the blueprint of how because of lack of personal experience, direct exposure, in her (and his) developmental history. Taoism tries though. Tries to provide such blueprint. I don't know if it can succeed. I know we're done for if nothing succeeds. Even if we reincarnate into some future perfection. Timing is everything. Future perfection is useless even if it's real. Everything that is done, is done once and forever, it's a "time capsule" (to use the term from a book I'm reading) that is not connected to a future "time capsule" -- yes they're both within tao, but they don't help each other live their respective "nows" anymore than two random distant points of the circle do. Yes they are part of the same infinite circle. No, it doesn't matter unless they act it, do it, live it. Weird, huh?

Couldn't find anything in English. These are pariah scientists, i.e. scientists who report on their findings as is, even though the findings contradict the currently held beliefs in the "scientific community." The findings don't allow the current paradigm to hold water. The technology used in the erection of the complex, which is huge and has several sites excavated to date (hence the length of the video), can be one of two things only and no third: either technology of a pre-Neolithic human civilization that was advanced enough to have technical capabilities exceeding what we have today, or technology of a civilization that is "not us." I mean, it's not what people "want to believe" who found evidence of this technology. It's what is. So, anyone want to smirk about ancient civilizations or aliens or what-not should provide an alternative explanation with sufficient proof of its validity instead of smirking on the basis of ingrained dogma alone and no other proof. If it holds water, I for one will be happy to accept it. But it can't just fly in the face of facts with impunity, this nonexistent proof of facts being hogwash. Facts are facts. It's a fact that you can't polish a surface with precision of some stelae of Gobekli Tepe with today's technology. You can't get an angle on a carved pillar this precise with today's technology. And you can't have mechanically regular tool markings of this nature with today's tools. Let alone with stone axes cave folks are supposed to have been wielding at the time it was built. Let alone have accomplished building a construction of this magnitude in the framework of their purported social organization of the period. Something's got to give. It's usually the facts that do. There's just no room for them in the matrix.

Been following German and Russian work at Gobekli Tepe. Chronic debunkers are politely referred to the appropriate feed tube on Wiki to get their fix. Everybody else get your head outta your ass Egypt and go take a look at Turkey.

"Have joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Have no idea who the people are with whom I've been drinking."

I'm not saying anything in excess of what I said. Some folks enjoy talking to voices in their head. Fine by me, but why not find a different opening line for that most exciting (I'm sure) conversation than my posts which have nothing to do with what they feel like talking about?.. The point I'm making is, "scientific evidence" accepted as gospel and "dissenting opinions" "debunked" as hogwash are very interchangeable, we don't have any semblance of history that withstands "further findings" and "new research" and "breakthrough discovery" -- none, zip, study the history of history if you doubt it. I'm not making any other points. I'm no specialist in carbon dating, I'm a specialist in how often they change their mind when something is "the last word of science," is all. That's my only point of departure for this particular train of thought. I only talk about what I, me, personally, am a specialist in with any certainty. I'm a specialist in how unreliable our "everybody knows" is. I've studied it all my life. So my definition of "ridiculous" is flash-frozen science, not a fly in amber (70 million years old or a fake made yesterday -- we have to take someone's word for it in either case) but a fly in a piece of shit. New day, different shit. New fly, same shit. Same fly, different shit. Take your pick. This, too, is the matrix -- overwhelm with "nothing to hold on to except what we tell you right now." Nevermind that a second ago they told you something different. Nevermind that it was also the one and only true McCoy then. Give me a break. Life sciences don't exist, it's as simple as that. We are here now to make machines, not universal truths. Why don't we stick with what we're good at and leave the rest well alone.

One problem with various "debunkings" is that when you follow the money and find out who has paid the debunkers to debunk, the plot thickens. In Va Ri Ab Ly. Troy as a reality rather than myth was debunked a hundred times by the special interest hired debunkers -- until someone (Heinrich Schliemann) who was wealthy enough to retire at 36 invested his own money into finding out whether what he "believed in" -- to wit, historic reality behind Homer's "myth" -- was possible to excavate. Turned out it was. Few places got this lucky, few interpretations could be this straightforward, having the actual ruins and the famous text coming together to attest to their more-than-belief foundation. Most are stories untold and many are sites of manipulation untold -- and to jeer and smirk smugly when orthodoxy's for-profit dispensations are being questioned is the ticket of admittance to the club I don't belong to. Not because I couldn't gain admission with the same ease as the smug ones if I cared to, but because I'm easily disgusted.

One thing that does not survive for longer than 15-30 years: our "modern scientific evidence." The paradigm changes with this rapidity. And yet every time we are offered something new, it is offered as the final word. Except the next final word is not far off. A recent study seems to have shown that the Sphinx is 800,000 years old, based on erosion patterns carefully studied with modern equipment and the standard currently accepted methods and interpretations. http://www.ancient-code.com/who-built-the-great-sphinx-of-egypt-800000-years-ago-a-look-inside-pre-pharaonic-egypt/ Too radical to make the news -- too many paradigms would have to be reconsidered. Yet if a new paradigm is concocted, then it will perhaps be upgraded to what other studies suggest -- 2,5 million years old (or else not congruent with the current view of the historic pattern of the climate of Sahara! Our science has no trouble being of two minds about the same events -- specialization to the rescue, let's compartmentalize our knowledge so an "Egyptologist" does not have to be bothered by a "Geologist," and Bob's your uncle.) History as dispensed to the masses is a matrix creation in its own right. And when we're talking the oldest people on earth, what do we do about Mu, and its antecedent Atlantis, and all that jazz? Who exactly told us to ignore evidence as myth, and why?.. What do they have to show to prove a negative statement, something impossible to prove to begin with?.. Someone chose to presume -- or to suppress -- that's all the proof they need. Just hit "delete" and history is gone. That's how the Matrix works, no? What about hundreds of thousands of painstakingly destroyed libraries, including all the greatest ones of antiquity?.. WHY?..

I see what you mean. Yes, it does sound as though they're talking about a particular force that, um... trumps tao. There's parts of taoism, mercifully surviving and available today as they were thousands of years ago, which constitute its arts, sciences and practices. You can replicate the path of their creators today -- you don't take anyone's word for what's true, you learn the steps and dance the magic dance of Emperor Yu and you are Emperor Yu if you've mastered it, and know exactly what he knew -- and what no book knows. Then there's parts, picked up later along the way from other traditions, that are beliefs, statements of faith, and declarations. These are easily discerned as propagations of hierarchical Indo-European paradigms, with a father figure on top, an obligatory male that has to trump and/or appropriate any and all "mother" forces. Some have the Three Pure Ones presided over by Yuanshi Tianzun, while others place the deified aspect of Laozi above all and transform tao into him. I am not very familiar with these aspects of religious taoism (though I am with its other aspects, empirical ones -- e.g. I accept and venerate quite a few deities of personal significance to me, some of them former mortals who became gods via cultivation. I seek wisdom and guidance from the Eight Immortals and the God of War and the God of Literature and the Goddess of Mercy, to name a few. And Emperor Yu and Fuxi. And, of course, Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the West.) I don't feel like arguing with its precepts, it's just that they are not far enough from what I departed from when I departed from Indo-European cognitive pathways to tackle those big issues by altogether different methods. Taoism that is a science-art-practice can operate without "names," though it can often be aided by diagrams -- Hetu, Luoshu, bagua, I Ching, wuji, taiji tu, etc.. Diagrams in their turn become meaningful via practices. Practices in their turn become meaningful via contemplation, meditation, integration. The net result is, I don't need to believe in anything as a prerequisite for having an opinion. Opinions that arise in this manner can't be erased by a paragraph from a competing text, because they are not rooted in a text, a statement of faith, a declaration, a belief system. And what they are rooted in is not easy to unravel to the same extent it wasn't easy to acquire.

I may have omitted one step -- Tao gives birth to One. Tao and "One" are a mother-child relationsh, not one and the same. "One" is where all futher things manifest come from and originate, but "One" itself is a manifestation, not the source. So any unification back to the source will of necessity have to absorb this oneness. The only way it can be done is by reverting to wuji, which is nonbeing, tao-in-stillness, and the only way being can come is from nonbeing. "Being comes from nonbeing" -- Laozi -- but the opposite is also true, and not "once" but "always" -- "nonbeing reverts back to being." It is an eternal pulse with no beginning or end, this part is true, but within this pulse, any "being" has a beginning, middle, and end. A new "being" may come from nonbeing once it ends, but all things manifest are finite, only the unmanifest is infinite, the source of all being and nonbeing, all potentials -- far exceeding what has "already" manifested as "being" and will "in the long run" manifest as being. Potentials exist within nonbeing and are not equal to manifestations. Nonbeing is always infinitely greater, and its pull on all "being" is irresistible -- return! As is its push on all "being" -- begin, go play! This is the unified tao-in-stillness/tao-in-motion which is the mother of all things. Not one half of her, not either half of her. Both are tao, and neither is the whole tao. The whole tao is a being-nobeing pulse of stillness-motion. The mantra of taoism is, "the way of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return." Being returns to nonbeing. Nonbeing reverts to being. Oh, and Yuanshi Tianzun (Yuan-shih T'ien-tsun -- The First Principal) is not tao -- he is one of the gods of taoism's polytheistic pantheon, in charge of his domain but by no means equal to "mother of all things" -- he is one of her sons. So, for our practical purposes: to a classical taoist, "being" is big enough to be concerned with, it is worthy of our full participation, full awareness, full assessment, and full enjoyment. Being is there to be savored. Being that turns into suffering is not the right kind. Suffering is thought of as mustard to your beef, wasabi to your sushi -- not the main dish. Suffering is there to teach one's Hun compassion, its role is to awaken the sense of oneness of all beings, it's a strong medicine that must cure one possible way to deviate from the Way too far -- going into a state of "bu ren," non-human, i.e. not identifying with other humans (and live beings in general), going numb, losing parts of awareness (of self and others, which is the same thing.) However, a medicine and nourishment are not the same. Tao never intends to feed her offspring nothing but medicine -- most of what she provides is nourishment. "The Great Mother's breast" -- Laozi again. Yet some of her offspring just won't take the medicine, while others force-feed it to someone else, while still others mistake it for nourishment, while still others spit it out in disgust and lose all appetite for life. Those are the "no return" departures from the Way I was talking about.

3bob, you keep making me think.. so you have to face/read the consequences! Let me try to unravel it via the "simple and easy" steps. 1. Tao is perfect until she moves. Tao in stillness is absolutely balanced. She does not consist of "nothing" unlike the "absolutes" of some other paradigms though, rather she consists of a "nothing-everything" that wuji is, no things and the potential for all things. No fun until this potential manifests. To allow for this boring uneventful perfection to "do something," tao, as some classics put it, "has a bead." Other classics talk about a spontaneous clap of thunder arising in the third (Spring, beginning, Conception) trigram. Of course the "bead" is not material, but I'm able to perceive it, it's an inherent property of nonbeing to form a center of "being," a "virtue" of stillness to engender movement, in a certain "spot-moment" whose potential to "be" and "move" is stronger than at any other non-place and non-time. It's something that can be discerned from the diagrams better than words, and perceived best in stillness meditations. The diagram of the Earlier Heaven has an immaterial yet somehow existent "imaginary point" where all the balanced forces intersect -- and then perhaps a reaction occurs between the third trigram and that point that results in an asymmetrical "spark" flying between existence and nonexistence... Existence begins. 2. Once it begins, the balance is disturbed, things are propelled into motion. They have no choice at first where and how to move -- yang floats up, yin sinks down. The world separates into duality under the pull of these simple forces of heavier-lighter, lighter-darker. Tao has given birth to Two. 3. Two gives birth to Three, and that's where it gets interesting. Free will kicks in. This Three comes to be when one yin, one yang pick up an extra yin or an extra yang. Or two yin, two yang pick up an extra yin or an extra yang. Still uneventful if they observe the symmetry, say one yin-yang binary pair picks up one yang, another picks up one yin. They behave until there's eight of them. And then -- then choices become possible. 4. Choices kick in -- go left or right, or across, forward or back, not just up and down. You have two yin one yang, you start sinking -- you hit a three yang Tian trigram, connect to it, and you start floating up! Now you can decide you might want to drop the "ballast," one yin, and go back to heaven! Some trigrams get this idea in their head... They start striving for "purity." Or something else happens that is a mistake of judgment. 5. Mistakes of judgment are the price to pay for free will. 6. If you want a perfect world, be prepared to be part of a machine. Tao does not like being a machine. She prefers to be alive. To be alive means to have choices, freedom, creativity... a soul. The price to pay for these goodies is the ability to make wrong choices, freedom to go out of control, creativity that might breed monsters. 7. Can tao be "blamed" for this? No. Can those who make mistakes be blamed? No -- if they correct them and don't persevere in their deviation. (Mistakes can be corrected with free will, not just made.) And yes -- if they won't correct their mistakes, if they keep going away from the Way farther and farther. If they persevere in being monsters and morons. 8. In going away from the Way, there's a point of no return. Tao will never have a problem starting from scratch, being uncreated and eternal. But everything she creates that turns against her... when she starts from scratch, that's what she scratches off. Clean slate. Tao can never be harmed. Tao can never harm. But she does give her creations the ability to harm themselves and others if they so choose -- and the ability to figure it out. If they can't figure it out, she loses interest in them... whereupon she loses them. Us.

Slavery is when the species enslaved degrades into a pale ghost of its natural self and/or disappears. If it's going on for hundreds of millions of years (as is the case with ants) without destroying the host species, it's not slavery, it's symbiosis. Just like you are symbiotic with all the bacteria in your gut -- 1,5 pound of them -- they take something from you, but they also give plenty in return. You can be sterilized of them with antibiotics and they won't take from you -- but then you will be quite unhappy because it's a give and take, and once they don't take, they don't give and you have to learn to live without vitamin K (they make it) and it means any number of blood disorders -- to say nothing of a screwed up digestion, assimilation, elimination and so on. Yes, I repeat -- we interpret symbiotic relationships as parasitic invasions because we anthropomorphise. No parasite in its right mind will invade the host species to extinction, they are not suicidal. We are. That's why we ascribe our sentiments to parasitic animals. But they aren't idiots even on the viral level of intelligence. Why do you think the flu virus does not mutate to be 100% lethal? It could -- easily. It won't -- it's not suicidal. However, lab-created, man-made viruses, weaponized ones, are like that. We are not interested in their survival when we create our killer machines. The natural ones are, however. The Black Plague, incidentally, was a man-made ecological event. The outcome of the witch hunts which the inquisition extended to cats -- burning at the stake, alongside witches, nearly all of Europe's tens of millions of cats. Bad idea for an agricultural society storing grains for their staple food, which rats are so interested in. Instead of a few rats making it to those storage facilities, the rest being kept at bay by cats, you get hundreds of millions. At this rate of infestation it's only a matter of time before the one rat infested with plague-carrying fleas gives them to his every rodent brother. And then we have cramped city living so an epidemic can't be contained, and malnutrition (exterminating cats was followed by famines due in part to same rat activity) -- and weakened, unprotected, immune-compromised hosts start dying by the million. Nature does not work this way. It's us who can turn a parasite, normally an adversity with some benefits to it too (e.g. cancer cells are what underlies the mechanism of development of new traits -- i.e. our cherished ability to evolve in response to a changing environment) into a speciecidal disaster. No, I don't agree at all that slavery is part of nature. Think again...

I don't believe predators are "wrong" morally, or existentially, or "by design," or any which way. When they overpredate in excess of the natural creation-destruction balance, well that's us, that's abnormal. When they underpredate because we decided to regulate nature to our liking... the deer destroyed the habitat of thousands of other species, plant and mammal and fish and bird and insect, when we decided to make Yosemite national park "safe" by killing all wolves. Whereupon a lot of effort was invested into reintroducing wolves before we got ourselves yet another desert. Predators are fine. The natural fourfold cosmic cycle of Conception-Growth-Fruition-Consummation couldn't work without them. It's deranged predators that, locally, make the rate of 'Consummation' abnormally high, whereby the universal process is locally thrown off balance. We are in such location. I'm not even sure it can't potentially destroy the whole universe, not just this one planet. There's this theory that the flapping of a butterfly's wing in Texas can get amplified to a hurricane in Uruguay. Who knows -- maybe pulling wings off butterflies and bees on Earth causes gods to die on Jupiter. Which is why I hope they will put up a fight. If not for us, then for themselves. Otherwise we're royally screwed.

Everything you're talking about is derived from humans presenting animal life in a certain way. They don't bother with proof -- they just extrapolate what they are doing or experienced done to them onto all other species. Discovery channel, e.g., has been consistently, selectively, and relentlessly portraying animal life as brutal, cruel, violent and gory for many years. It is anything but in reality! Territorial fights, competition, etc. arise when habitats shrink -- and we haven't dealt with animals who hadn't been misplaced by us in many centuries. Hundreds of millions of creatures exterminated on the North American continent alone and in one century alone may well have left standing only the terminally neuroticized survivors -- on top of taking away their lands, their food, water, shelter, safety, freedom. I gave up on the Discovery BS even though I love animal shows -- it's all matrix propaganda, alas. Leave it to amateur videos (thanks, youtube) to show the real story -- of countless (I've seen dozens and watch a couple new ones every day) interspecies friendships, adoptions, fun, help, benevolence, cooperation, curiosity and delight...

Of course, details are important -- precision is important -- and so is imprecision, room for self-adjustment. The Chernobyl reactor blew up because there was no such margin of operational imprecision it would tolerate. The parameters had to be precisely "just so" -- in such a design, a very slight deviation is catastrophic. The Challenger, ditto. A very, very slight imprecision proved fatal. Live things always allow for fuzzy-logical adjustments, for the "general idea" not to have to rely on every single individual nut and bolt having been screwed in place "just so" -- there's always ways to tighten or loosen them without sacrificing the whole organism to a slight under- or over-tightening. Say, you have a "sibling." This does not specify if you have a brother or a sister, it's a fuzzy-logical statement. If some benefactor announced that he will give a million dollars to you provided you give half to your sibling, both you and this imprecise 'sibling" would get the money. But if the same offer was, you get a million bucks provided you give half to your sister -- a more precise/detailed way to define "sibling" -- well, what if your "sibling" is a brother?.. Such precision would rob both you and your brother of half a million each. The fastest and safest trains currently in existence were first built in Japan based on the mathematical theory of fuzzy logic. Whose genius developer's words I like to quote every chance I get: "When complexity strikes, meaningful statements lose precision and precise statements lose meaning."

I used to experiment with the whole gamut of Orthomolecular, Cognitive Enhancement, and Life Extension protocols. The only things from that arsenal I never touched are the ones whose effects can potentially be irreversible (e.g. L-Dopa). However, even with the safest, thoroughly researched and carefully administered combos, I ran into a few surprises. Most of them nice. A few, quite challenging. E.g., one of the amino cocktails coupled with nootropics eliminated my ability to feel guilt, shame, or deference toward authority. This was not a bad thing, but the downside was that it also eliminated the brakes from my self-expression, so I could tell an authority "you're full of shit" with no remorse, regret, or second-guessing myself. Without that cocktail I'm a LOT more polite. That was a long time ago. Next phase was a series of herbal experiments -- from pretty much all traditions of the world. I have an extensive herbal library in two languages. Next -- focusing on one favorite tradition, TCM. Replicating (and occasionally creating my own) herbal formulas from that domain. Of course "herbal" is a shorthand for "earth-derived" as opposed to "lab-created," so it included some animal products and minerals too. Next -- external-alchemical goodies, from dit da jow to gem elixirs, to variously charged water, that kind of stuff. Currently -- well, ran out of steam, taking a break, too busy or too lazy to keep it up. Pity. Now would be the time to apply everything I've learned over the years toward my taoist goals, but I just don't. So, I maintain a few staples for emergencies, and the only "regular" supplement I take as needed is a good digestive enzyme for whenever I eat out (because the portion is usually larger than my usual) or overdo it with munchies. My diet is currently exactly what I want it to be, what I believe I should eat and none of what I believe I shouldn't -- total control. It's not always like that, but right now it is. Kudos to me.

Futuredaze, thank you for your thoughts. I largely agree. I think "fragmentation of consciousness" is the devil -- not the same thing as "details" though, "details" are more in the domain of "precision," and it's a benevolent force when (and only when) it is combined every step of the way with "fuzziness," imprecision, the foggy field of uncertainty where freedom, not ironclad order, can unfold its wings, like Zhuangzi's bird Peng arising from ocean foam and clouds and enveloping the sky. Sharp precise yang that can focus on a detail only works well together with soft "general-feel," ''overall-picture" yin that is the only force able to give this detailed sharpness proper direction, harmonize it. Taiji's "steel needle wrapped in soft cotton." We live in an age that has stripped away the soft cotton and came to promote hardness, sharpness, rigid inflexible structures. Which of course can only do one thing -- crumble. The bigger they come, the harder they fall -- one and all. Yup. Key word "connections." The way I see it, the mind is not wrong or useless until it disconnects from the heart, the body, the soul, the world, nature, life, the process of living what you're thinking and thinking what you're living, not what someone else told you to think "about." Our current matrix fosters such minds, barren, shattered, but also arrogant as hell -- it's easy to get arrogant when you have a hammer and no direct experience of anything but nails to interact with... Such minds transform hearts, souls, bodies, the world, nature, life into a bunch of such nails to nail... Idiots.

In one of Her on-the-side forays into linguistics, ayahuasca taught me to say "I'm grateful" instead of "I'm sorry." You are not 'sorry,' She insisted. You did or said something unproductive, unfair, or erroneous -- and then the miracle of comprehension happened and you realized you shouldn't have done or said that, and perhaps next time you won't. For this miracle of self-reflection and self-correction that you are able to perform, you should be grateful. Say it. I'm grateful I'm late, this way I've learned how much time I really need to get to this place, and won't keep you waiting the next time. I'm grateful I stepped on your toe, this has shown me that it's a bad idea to step backward without looking in a narrow isle, and I'm grateful I won't step on a little child's toe this way, now that I'm aware. I'm grateful I broke my promise to you, now I know how careless I can be, I had no idea that I can be this flaky, well now I know, now I can do something about it. I'm grateful I told you "you're just like your father," I had no idea you would get so angry on hearing that because you work so hard on not being like your father -- now I know and I really admire this determination in you. And so on. Does it make sense to anyone?