Taomeow

3bob, that's pretty awesome. The best (and very taoist) way to learn -- via directly participating, "embodying" what you observe rather than remaining an "objective observer" (i.e. someone on the outside looking in) -- and integrating what you've learned. I used to windsurf -- on a windy lake about a mile wide. Didn't know anything about tao then, but this quickly taught me what I later recognized as, e.g., wuwei -- the sail catches the wind blowing in the direction you're going anyway, and your role is not to interfere... Then the wind changes abruptly, and you turn the sail ever so slightly (or dramatically) to still go where you want to go. Then the wind becomes erratic all of a sudden, turns into a local mini tornado and you are overpowered and fall, sometimes not even where you choose to fall (which is, away from the whole falling contraption) but just randomly, with the mast, sail, rope, the whole kaboodle entangling you under water. No need to "do something about it!" -- carefully disengage, surface, climb back, pull up the sail... oops... same mini tornado, off you go, repeat performance. Sometimes the wind would play this game with me until I got not so much tired -- for some reason going with the flow didn't tire me at all -- as hungry, and then, miraculously, I would finally figure out how to maneuver to get back to shore.

I'm not sure... What I read is mostly related either to what I practice, or what I plan/hope to practice. If you want a bird's view, I think Eva Wong's "The Shambala Guide to Taoism" is a decent place to start -- therein you can get many pointers toward subjects and sources that might look interesting to you toward a deeper immersion.

3bob, interesting thoughts. 20-80 are well in the domain of "the Three." I haven't thought about it before, thank you for the pointer. OK, let's see... The one-two-three are none other than one yin, one yang, and the newcomer, which is either one more yin or one more yang. So we can have, e.g., yin-yang-yin, and there we have it -- a 33% yang/66% yin (rounding off the fractions) primary trigram, one we call Kan. Or we get a yang-yin-yang primary trigram, 33% yin/66% yang, we call it Li. And so on, to a total of 8 (because the yin and yang are also timing sensitive -- in graphic depictions of trigrams they assume a "lower" -- it means "earlier" -- or "middle," or "upper" -- "later"-- position.) And then they mate. Now if the yang-yin-yang trigram Li chooses to mate with a yang-yang-yang trigram we call Tian, what do we get? We get offspring that has 5 parts yang and 1 part yin, to a total of 20% yin, 80% yang. We call this baby, depending on the order in which that one yin appears among the five yang, Hexagram Kou, or Hexagram Lu, etc., up to 6 such babies can be (and are) born, off-kilter all of them. There we go into the domain of the off-balance deeper and deeper. 64 deep. We are on difficult territory here. Taoists don't like to think too much, but when they do, they use the method the Great Treatise (Ta Chuan) defines as "the easy and the simple," after the methods used by heaven ("easy") and earth ("simple"). All the staggering complexity of the "ten thousand things" arises from multiple subsequent steps of change, each one easy and simple, incremental -- and their increasingly numerous connections, combinations, and repetitions. Now once you're looking at something as complex as "karma," you are dealing with many unknowns, all the easy and simple steps that have lead to a particular "karmic" combination are not available for scrutiny. I do Chinese astrology. I look at a bazi chart and see karma right there -- the imbalance, the "too much" and "not enough," the conflict, the good and bad luck, and what the person can and cannot do about it. That's as far as I will tackle karma. Could I find out exactly how it came to be? Oh yes -- but I would need to know the exact time of birth from a previous incarnation, and the one before, and the one before, assuming it can be somehow known. The thing is, only the exact time of this-here life is a certainty. Karma, reincarnations, how and why this works -- none of it can be revealed via the methods of heaven and earth, the easy and the simple. So, tackling karma is not a taoist pursuit (except for the schools and sects that have incorporated a good deal of Buddhist ideas.) It is something that happens in the mind of a believer. Taoists don't reject its validity, but there's nowhere to go down that road. So the free will available to us is applied elsewhere. When I say that "tao has been destroyed" at a particular time in a particular place, I can prove it with simple math, no beliefs required. Which is why I say we are on difficult territory. Some things have to be believed in without proof... beliefs are a yang force, whenever it's deficient, they work toward restoring the balance. Not so in a situation where yang dominates... Where yang dominates, beliefs are harmful. All of them...

It does have its root in tao, per my investigation. Tao is not a machine, it allows for stochastic happenings. Classical Xuan Kong (spacetime, philosophical and abstract in addition to pragmatic and hands-on) feng shui assesses situations and events left to chance, probability, uncertainty at about 20% of everything happening in tao's overall all-encompassing domain. That's a helluva lot, although not as much as Einstein allows for, yet a lot more than various orthodox paradigms allow for, which either ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to their one true god or else envision only one way out of our troubles -- nonexistence. To me, this taoist idea is actually the only one that makes sense, that allows for the existence of uncalled-for adversity yet not for its reigning supreme. Incidentally, it also allows for the uncalled-for good fortune, undeserved salvation -- chance is chance, it does not concern itself with order, justice, or common sense. If all was left to chance, it would be a hopelessly meaningless universe. But no. 20%. I believe we fell victim to something panning out that does occasionally, though not often, pan out. For a million years, it didn't. And then -- kaboom -- it did. Not everybody gets stricken by lightning, in fact the majority of creatures never do. But does it matter for that one unfortunate one who does? He or she is it. The focal point of that probabilistic injustice without which justice can't balance itself. On the same day, someone else will find the love of his/her life, a pot of gold, or "the meaning of it all." Most will find it because they did something to deserve it. But 10% will find it just because they got lucky. And another 10% will be stricken by lightning, hit by a car, or lose their planet to archons. This too shall pass, change, rearrange. But it may take a long while... I think we were hit with that 10% of tao's rotten tomatoes... It doesn't end there though if we could just stop praising their flavor and gobbling them up. 80% of nonrandomness of tao is further broken down into 40% predetermined stuff (which now, in our case, includes the outcome of the fallout of that 10% bad luck) and 40% choice, free will, our own power to stir the events in the right direction. Maybe we will learn to use that someday. Maybe not. That's how I see the bigger picture anyway.

I think we might find several kinds of opposing consciousness carriers. Some will be parasitic. Some archonic, doing their ignoble work of replacing biology with technology, the free will embedded in nature's creations with the total control over a universal machine. What Laozi called "the followers of death," anti-life. And some, ruthless competitors. Or maybe it's the same entity in its different aspects. What did Native Americans encounter when the continent was "discovered" by the whites? All of the above. Those Europeans, however, encountered the same forces a bit earlier, and were already a product of their takeover. As were parts of the American continent, it also already had "civilizations" -- those of course were the first to go when clashing with other "civilized" people, once the game is set up, it's what the pieces on the board do, they gobble each other up. The hand that moves them, however, remains unaffected.

It would only be fair if bees poisoned people with their chemicals for a change of pace. But I don't think anything stands a chance against our puppeteers, the master poisoners. I caught a next-door-neighbor once spraying pesticides on my all-organic little vegetable garden, on the sly. When I politely inquired what the fuck he thought he was doing, he said that he "thought" he saw poison ivy. It was my cucumbers, actually. Talk about the matrix. He couldn't sleep at night knowing that someone is not using poisons like normal matrix-integrated people do. She has to pay for this aberration... she's bound to be breeding poison ivy, poisonous snakes, the ten biblical plagues -- otherwise, if she is not using poisons and gets away with it, the whole matrix is threatened, the cognitive dissonance is just unbearable!.. And mine were the best vegetables and flowers on the block. Everybody asked what I use, all the time. I honestly said, nothing -- well, water -- I have healthy earthworms in the soil, very many of them, because I don't poison them, so they do all the fertilizing for me. Everybody was disappointed by this answer no end, they thought I was keeping a secret. Some special poisonous concoction that I wouldn't reveal. It's like that with everything. As I said before... bad matrix, and the carefully installed resentment of the blue-piller majority against the red-piller minority is part of its overall lousiness.

It's very likely, but I don't remember exactly. Sorry about that. I just read too much too fast... whenever a subject piques my interest, I might grab every single book on that subject from the library, throw on Kindle the ones they don't have, and buy others -- and read them all more or less in a gulp, the result being that I educate myself on the subject but forget authors' names and book titles. (I'm studying for myself, not for a test, that's why. ) This one was not part of an investigation into the Yanomame or the matrix or any of this particular thread's subjects, it was, rather, one of many on a topic I was investigating at that particular point -- the Amazon in general and Amazonian shamanism in particular.

Someone I know?

https://www.sociedelic.com/these-himalayan-bees-make-psychedelic-honey/

He may have been loopy, but in your neck-of-woods they do take "dreamtime" seriously, don't they?.. A lot of my own hopelessly politically unsavvy views are derived from dream-visions of the way things used to be a long, long time ago. I can't offer them as "proof" of anything. All I know is, I have my proof in my genetic memory, and in all senses whenever they briefly awaken to those memories. Occasionally "modern science" throws me a bone, in the shape of "proof" of something I know via those unscientific direct-access pathways. Most of the time, however, the bones it supplies are plastic, gypsum, or otherwise inedible for someone whose senses and sensibilities are operational. A recent "proof" came my way in the form of a discovery by the scientific community of a powerfully psychedelic honey known to the locals high in the Himalayas. It is not accessible to people unless they are top level climbers, know where to look, know how to protect themselves, etc. -- this honey is one of the most expensive substances on the planet. Well, I wrote about it some fifteen years ago, though I never heard of it then and neither did the "scientific community." I remembered it... I remembered ceremonies where it was used, I remembered a sister mixing it with some paint and applying it to my face. As clearly as I remember today. Anyway... per my unscientific direct sources, our prehistory was paradise. Maybe not always and not everywhere and not everybody's. Mine was.

Oh, pretty much everywhere -- if you focus on one possibility, you can verify it (or disprove it) by checking it against multiple sources.

No, they are definitely an aberration -- however, by 1985 which you reference, many were converted to Catholicism, by Jesuit missionaries (one of the main engines of propagation of violence by many arcane and secretive methods in global history), and I've read a book that actually contains an account of how white "missionaries" and "researchers" actually provoked inter-tribal wars before reporting them. E.g. the chief's son's head was cut off and nailed to the tree by a French dude who carefully and expertly framed someone in the tribe because he wanted to research how the Yanomame go to war. What I was describing is also from that book -- traditional conflict resolution. I offered an accurate picture per my source -- the story was narrated by the Yanomame shaman gone Catholic.

Actually, historically, people from the densely populated places were every bit as violent toward their own, but also had a tendency to export this violence far and wide. Just ask the residents of the former British colonies about their experience -- or the Chinese about their encounters with the Japanese. Do consider that we are so arranged that we learn via windows of opportunity that open and close very early on, and by imprinting that cannot be deleted since it shapes the lower and middle brain -- only the neocortex learns differently, but it's a late acquisition both ontogenically and philogenically and does not call the shots at all, contrary to what it believes about itself. 95% of everything we will ever learn we learn by imprinting in infancy and early childhood --each window of opportunity closed at that time can never be reopened. We aren't even extreme at that -- puppies, e.g., die if the mother does not lick them within 30 minutes of birth, and missing this window can't be remedied even five minutes later -- but we are extreme enough too in this respect. Our brains change more between birth and the age of 5 than they will change during the rest of our lives by 95% -- i.e. only 5% of the overall learning, conditioning, mind and soul shaping we undergo in a lifetime happens after this age. Which is why the developmental history of a nation's childhood is the history of this nation.

Ah, movies. What would we do without them if we wanted to imagine what things and people no one has ever seen really looked like. Hollywood knows, of course. Who else? Some paleoanthropologists, however, are of the opinion that we were stunningly beautiful rather than disgusting the way Hollywood portrays our ancestry. They base this assertion on skull measurements allowing for facial reconstructions, and on the overall Fibonacci-perfect skeletal proportions which can be reshaped into that ugliest-of-apes-like monstrosity only by a moron. Michael Crichton, cheesy as he may be, did incorporate some genuine and juicy scientific tidbits in his novels, and in one of them an archeologist protagonist asserts that all sex Neanderthals had with our species (which they did, we now have genetic proof) was pity sex, because they were even prettier -- tall fair and handsome, Hollywood can only salivate over what they looked like but can't replicate this, with its midget pretty boys with peroxide-perfect hair and hundreds of thousands of dental work's worth in their mouths.

I don't doubt we killed, we were hunter-gatherers. Did we kill each other? Very unlikely. Even today, or at least a couple decades ago, the most violent of tribes ever contacted, the Yanomame, resolved their inter-tribal conflicts by fighting one on one, like in our boxing or MMA -- in their scenario there's also an arena built for conflict resolution, surrounded by spectators from both sides, and two fighters take turns hitting each other with a stick. The one being hit waits, then it's his turn to hit the opponent. That's it. One can suffer bone damage from this, but they don't fight to kill. They fight to resolve and end the dispute. I say this is superior to going to war.

Well, they were domesticated, those tribes you mention -- this didn't start with the industrial revolution. This started with agriculture that brought about innovative child-rearing practices. Derrick Jensen, author of "A Language Older Than Words," cites this one distinct feature all those peaceful vs. violent 'primitive" tribes differ in: attitudes toward childhood and children. Infant and child-rearing practices. The peaceful ones embrace a newborn child in love and tolerance and acceptance and care. Later their children are free to explore the world and their place in it. The violent ones, by contrast, "school" and "discipline" their children, setting out to break them from the get-go into some preconceived shape. Their children are not born good enough for them, they need to be worked on -- with cruelty. That's domestication for you. I keep thinking, though I don't have definitive proof, that this is the outcome of an extraneous intervention, assaulting us in several waves (but simultaneous in many places every time), because we were so successful for so long before domestication, we couldn't have "evolved" into cruel civilized beasts we are today, because it is something that would have eliminated us long ago. Domesticated species, any and all of them, fall apart very fast, they don't thrive long term, they accumulate deformities and maladaptive traits with every generation. E.g. modern domestic sheep lose 3 out of 4 pregnancies to early spontaneous abortion, something that starts happening in populations of animals suffering from too much accumulated abnormality, eventually going extinct (in evolutionary terms, in a split second.) Some researchers assert that humans currently lose more than 9 out of 10 pregnancies this way (so early that most such events go unnoticed.) We could never have spent so much time on this planet if this was the case in prehistory. So, domestication is a ticket to agriculture, civilization, violence, and extinction -- the four cornerstones of our current matrix.

Desires, right? Attachments, is that it? Sigh... Attachments, which is the bad word for "connections," "relationships," is the only thing awareness has to go on. All those stories of "pure awareness" have to attach the word "pure" to what they are talking about, have you noticed?.. Desires are the only tool that we have to measure the strength of these connections which hold all of awareness together. The problem is with the way some people, demons, monsters calibrate this tool. I have never seen a wild animal drink more water than it needs. Domesticated ones do though -- e.g. horses. There's something wrong with domestication. What's wrong is that it's another word for enslavement. Nature did not invent it. By the way, many years ago I was instantly enlightened in the best traditions of the genre the moment I read this line in a book by biologist Konrad Lorenz: "the abnormal and pathological process of domestication of humans."

Do we live in a house built by mafia-controlled developers, on unstable ground prone to erosion and seismically active, constructed out of the cheapest and unsound materials, cold in winter hot in summer, continuously releasing toxic fumes into our indoor air, the walls painted with carcinogenic paints, the floors treated with immune- and CNS-suppressing chemicals, the roof insulated with asbestos damaging our lungs, the electromagnetic pollution from the nearby power lines continuously disrupting our DNA, or in a cave in nature? And isn't the "matrix" that put us in that house different from the "matrix" that put our ancestors in a cave, a tepee, a yurt?.. I think the answer to the question "do we live in a matrix" is yes, but it's not really important. What is important is to understand that it's a bad matrix. Bu ren -- numb and numbing to the real human nature. The way out is not into some "ultimate reality" (again an arrangement sterilized of humans! don't the overlords just love the idea of getting rid of us, by hook or by crook! and of all things life!) as much as into the genuine human reality far as I'm concerned. We are not in Kansas anymore, that's the real problem. All those abstract ideals are fine to pursue if real human life proves unsatisfactory. But we would have to experience that first before deciding it's not good enough. I suspect it's mighty good enough, we seem to have enjoyed it for a million years... till the very recent installation of the mafia-made matrix.

Can be a dream within a dream. Or even funkier than that. The "you" who went to sleep and the "you" who wakes up within a dream gone lucid are not the same you. The "you" who "returns" to the "ordinary world" after a lucid dream is not the "you" who went to sleep in that bed (it's not that bed, for that matter) and not the same "you" who was awake in the lucid dream either. Each hemoglobin molecule in your blood consists of 574 amino acid molecules. They are arranged in four chains which twist around each other to form a 3D globular structure of unimaginable complexity that looks like the most convoluted thornbush of the kind that can't exist in nature yet does, the kind where not a single twig is arranged randomly, every twist and turn is exactly the fraction of a fraction of a degree it is, and every "thorn" points in a particular direction and no other. This staggeringly complex and absolutely precise architecture is identically repeated about six thousand million million million times in your blood. These structures are assuming this particular exact shape at the rate of four hundred million million per second while others are being destroyed at the same rate. You are, effectively, someone else on the molecular level from someone you were at any point in the past, are in the present, or will be in the future merely because you exist -- and I'm not even talking the atomic level. Yet throughout your life you identify this never-the-same entity as "you," in all its manifestations. On what grounds?.. This is the million dollar question. Taoism to the rescue... as usual.

Today: breakfast -- bacon and egg lunch -- bok choy tomato soup dinner -- red snapper with asparagus late night movie snack -- fresh goat cheese with blueberries

Totally agree. The best food is imaginative, and never boring, monotonous, or fully predictable. We are what we eat.

An analogy might be the ability to read. Yes, it must be created. And yes, we have the requisite physiological machinery to accomplish this. And no, not in a random place. You have to use the appropriate area of the brain to create this ability. You can't, e.g., create the ability to read in the amygdala, or corpus callosum, or the olfactory cortex. If children were teaching themselves to read by sniffing the books so as to create the reading center in the olfactory cortex, well... maybe they could learn to smell the difference between letters ( e.g. L and W have different amounts of typographic paint?.. arranged differently against the sniffing nose?) but it would take them much longer (decades? centuries?) to learn to read by this method.

Not the navel. You can find your lower dantien using the alchemical formula "heaven above, 32, earth below, 32." Measure your height, divide by two, measure that length on your body either from the top or from the bottom -- that's where it is. Meditation on the navel is not part of the taoist tradition. It places your focus in the "heaven" part of your body, away from the "earth" part, instead of on the yin-yang border between them where the LDT is located. Mantak Chia is pretty eclectic, he mixes and matches traditions to come up with something, well, different. The LDT "vortex" in the front corresponds in location to the mingmen (Gate of Life) point at the back, sitting right across from it. Horizontally the front and back points get connected with practice. Later you may want to move your LDT, but not just "anywhere," a practice might reveal a pattern for this motion. E.g. in taiji neigong, you move qi upward from the back, drop it down to the front from the top of your head, and your LDT will "bow downward-inward" and "release upward-forward" as you do. But for starters, feeling it where it naturally occurs would be enough.

Where?

Now which way to step? Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, peng, ji, lu, an... done.