Taomeow

and this is the catacombs of Paris --

Been there saw this -- the catacombs in the monastery of San Francisco, in Lima, Peru, have many, many of these pits -- each filled with human skulls and bones to the depth of 10 meters (about 30 feet)

Anyone who believes that the modern economic system, designed on the principles of "Neo-Classic Economic Theory," is not a Ponzi Scheme, created to ensure survivorship of the elite at the expense of everyone else, is living in denial. -- Seen today on Facebook, in a comment to something posted by Dr. Michael Saso

@ Nungali: seriously, quit trolling already.

@ thelearner: your worldview used to be mine. I believed in it, and I fought for it, it didn't fall on my lap, I wasn't born into it -- I chose it and pursued it. The fall from its shining ivory tower smack into reality was painful. Yours will be as painful. Unless you get lucky to be invited into "them," or already are, and thereby avoid it. I rest my case.

The thing is, this is not a unique situation with these three. You can't satisfactorily define anything else that really exists. You can define only mental constructs. Real stuff -- nope. Can describe, can't define. And how to describe something is also not a simple task, as infinite tasks go. Definitions are not part of reality. Descriptions are pointers toward reality but also not it. The difficulty with "human" is that you are one and that's how you know that no definition gets you and no description exhausts the subject. As usual, taoism to the rescue. Taoists avoid defining anything and prefer to describe everything instead, but for complex phenomena they go in a roundabout way, by pointing out what that thing isn't. Once you exclude everything this way that this thing could be mistaken for, whatever you are left with is it. Even axiomatic definitions in taoist mathematics go, "this is as true as that the horse is not an ox." Pretty clear, right? I could easily explain (to an alien from another planet who really doesn't know) what a human, man, woman are not. Whatever remains is it. The great Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, in his fundamental non-sci-fi work on the philosophy of science, Summa Technologiae, gives a following example of the impossibility of definitions without descriptions. A telegram (the book was written when they still existed) is intercepted by an alien civilization. It says, "Granny died, funeral Wednesday." To understand this text is impossible if that alien civilization 1)does not have the concept of "grandparent" because they, e.g., reproduce asexually, or even if they reproduce sexually, don't acknowledge grandparents as anything distinct or noteworthy (like we don't acknowledge totemic animals which some Native American tribes counted as "grandparents"); 2) does not have a way to understand that "granny" and "grandmother" are the same thing because, e.g., they don't use two different ways to point to the same person in their language; 3) does not have a way to understand "funeral" because, e.g., they don't bury their dead -- say they evaporate, or dissolve, or are left to their own devices, or don't exist because everybody is as immortal as our jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii; 4) does not have a way to understand "Wednesday" because they don't keep time, or don't keep time the way we do, with chunks of it designated as "weeks" and with days of these weeks being of such a duration that an event can be planned ahead -- their days might be too short or too long for that, or not there altogether; and so on. So comprehension would be impossible without an extensive foray into human biology, social customs, beliefs, calendars and where these come from, and what we mean when we say that someone "died," and emotions -- emotions!!! -- how do we explain what we feel about granny if they don't know what granny is and... and it's infinite. The possibilities for the impossibility of definitions are infinite. So, human?.. Ho-hum. Define cat -- to a cat... And then define cat to a snow leopard... Meow...

Flat earth derived from the bible is of course only as credible as the bible, no more, no less. But this fact does not absolve those who control science in a pretty totalitarian fashion globally, in case you haven't noticed. And anything that seems to work only on the condition that it is controlled in a totalitarian fashion is fishy in my book. Anything. As Joseph Stalin once intimated, "it doesn't matter in the least who votes for whom, it only matters who counts the votes." This fully applies to science, unfortunately. It doesn't matter who measures what. It only matters who puts the drill in the textbooks. Do you know? I do. I spent some time specifically following the money, finding out who finances a particular way science is sold to the public. I don't like those people. I'm not even sure they're people. In any event they are not scientists, any of them, anymore than Stalin came to power because someone voted for him. Or Mao Zedong. No one voted. And yet as a result, more people for a longer time than at any other point in history studied sciences that were completely "harmonized" with the party line. No exceptions. Not a single one. You think you live on the special happy island of the "free world" though, amidst the ocean of human and historical irrelevance, the island where these things don't happen. Far more than half the globe lives on some nasty planet you want to have nothing to do with, a planet where these things happen as a matter of protocol, business as usual, where there's absolutely no other way science happens except under conditions of absolute totalitarian dictate by non-scientists. But we of course are exempt. All science is created equal, but some is more equal than other. Things tend to get hairy though when someone starts revealing what the "elites" want concealed who is not a lone voice in the desert but a person of authority and credibility. These dissenters tend to be put in heavily guarded facilities, some of them medical. They tend to die of suicides, accidents, plane crashes, heart attacks with no history of heart disease, they tend to disappear, they tend to, in the best case scenario, get fired and blacklisted so no one else hires them, all sorts of unpleasant things happen to them. So most of course keep their mouths shut. Does it surprise you? Seem unlikely? I've personally known people who lived this...

The English for дурилка картонная is phoney baloney.

There's two etymologies of English words. One, which I studied at the university, relies on the findings of Romano-Germanic linguistics, which is considered serious science, complete with Grimm's Law aka the First Germanic Sound Shift, and digging up proto-Indo-European roots out of Sanscrit words and the like. We had an extraordinarily horrible professor for this. He had every speech impediment under the sun -- mispronounced three quarters of the alphabet and slurred his speech -- AND lost his temper instantly and terribly when asked to repeat something -- and there was no textbook he would accept as source of our studies for the exams, it HAD to be his lectures. It was impossible to take notes, nobody had them. The first time he turned to the chalkboard to write something on it, we had a glimmer of hope that we might finally understand what he's teaching. He started writing and turned out his handwriting was even less legible than his speech. A sheer nightmare. That's what Grimm's Law can do to its professional enforcer. So, this is the kind of etymology you get when you go to Wiki. And then there's the real thing, but... it is impossible to argue the real thing without accusing some well-established authorities of fraud. Yet much of science coming out of Germany circa Brothers Grimm time (which constitutes the foundation of "all" we are taught as "modern science") was just that -- the continuation of their fairy tales. The real etymology is something else... I didn't say what I said because I don't know. I said it because I know better.

Acupuncture either works wonders or doesn't work at all depending on who administers it. Make sure it's not an MD with acupuncture on the side, but rather an OMD or licensed acupuncturist who specializes in that. Also, acupuncturists who don't practice qigong or taiji (ideally for many years) are not very efficient. Not enough diagnostic sensitivity, not enough understanding of qi, not enough ability to guide it with needles. Traditional practitioners have their whole body to use as a diagnostic/therapeutic facility, but quickie-mart acupuncturists with their paint-by-numbers approach... maybe for something minor they are useful, not for serious chronic problems. By the way, does your (dustybeijing) name mean you live in Beijing? I know a miracle worker there, not an acupuncturist, a massage therapist. He works at a Buddhist temple the name of which I don't remember but I remember it was not far from Tiananmen square. He blew my mind. He tends to be perpetually drunk at work, verbally abusive of his patients, and explains everything that is going on by what he sees in the patient's past (with 90% accuracy, the remaining 10% unverifiable because, e.g., he talks about how someone got traumatized in infancy). But his was the kind of touch that made me hear the music of the spheres he's attuned to. I could feel that he "hears" everything in the body with his fingers. He also makes a hilarious face when he encounters a problem area -- as though he's utterly disgusted, like a monkey who accidentally smeared his paws with something sticky and unpleasant. And then, disgustedly, he removes that invisible "something." After his treatment I felt as though he reshaped me to be 14 again -- it's like your whole body suddenly remembers what it's like at its best.

Thank you for the invite, SC. To share my experience, I had menstrual cramps as a teenager (though more or less on the common end of the spectrum, similar to those most teenage girls get), but my twins were conceived when I was 20, and I never had a cramp after they were born. Many women report normalization of their menses after the birth of their first child, so whatever massive hormonal changes a full term pregnancy, natural labor, breastfeeding, and bonding (if mom is "really there") causes the body and psyche to undergo apparently harmonizes them for many. (The word "hormone" is derived from the word "harmony," that's the function of healthy hormones -- to establish harmony in the body.) I never had any irregularities to the periods after that either, could time myself to an hour -- 28 days like clockwork. The only time this was somewhat disrupted was in my one vegetarian year when I would get lighter but longer, and unevenly spaced (shorter intervals) periods, due to (as I soon figured out) anovulatory cycles the diet provoked. Female hormones are made out of saturated fat and cholesterol, believe it or not. Exercise -- well, it's true that athletic women suppress their estrogen/progesterone with excessive physical exertion and have many problems as a result, including menstrual and overall reproductive-health-related. Here in SoCal everybody exercises at the gym (I've never been), and you see many female bodies vigorously worked at that, however, reveal chronic estrogen deficiency and, possibly, testosterone excess -- strong and muscular but with hip to waist ratios that aren't exactly female, the hips too narrow the waist too wide -- in combo with artificial boobs (for certain social strata nearly a built-in uniform). Many years ago I learned something crazy about periods: the hormonal profile of a woman in the first day of her monthly period is identical to that of a newborn baby, in whom, in turn, the levels of stress hormones are directly dependent on the level of traumatization during birth. This gets imprinted, and if it was high, in a woman it will spike every month to replicate (in an attempt to resolve) that trauma. (I don't know how it works in men, but my observations tell me it's got periodicity as well but either irregular or with a kind of regularity that is less predictable.) The systemic trauma of modern birth is possible but very difficult to resolve. However, like I said, a natural window of reproduction (the ideal age being between 18 and 22, which the majority of women in the "developed" countries today miss) normalizes it in most cases if taken advantage of. Other than that, I would look to Chinese herbs and acupuncture. Vaccines are definitely a factor -- e.g. some of them (notably the one that is supposed to prevent cervical cancer) are banned in many "developed" countries yet are vigorously used in the "third world" -- their well-documented "side effect" is sterility. (The US is interesting in that this vaccine is recommended here for boys as well as girls.) But we won't get into that due to -- well, nevermind. Not going there beyond the already-committed digression.

人 -- Shakespeare either knew this character, or had a similar vision. "Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal." from King Lear

Well, you know Chinese, right? What's the Chinese word for "person" made out of, which radicals/notions/pictures/ideas? I have only scratched the surface of written Chinese (and not a deep scratch it is at that, yet), but I keep just positively yelping with delight every time I disassemble a word that is merely a sound in Indo-European languages yet often a whole worldview unfolding from a single Chinese character. E.g., the character for "love" is put together out of two other characters -- one means "woman," the other one, "child." Damn... Instantly you see what they saw: all love in existence is modeled on this one primary kind, and if this is messed up, it's something else, really... "Love" is this, and then the whole machinery can work to produce it in many other circumstances -- but it has to be installed first and there's only this one way. What is "love?" This... and all the later applications, modifications, utilizations and reverberations of this. So -- care to share what you know about "person" in Chinese?

Since my credo for all purposes, macro to micro, is co-creation, I believe the whole has a say in it too once it's been co-created by whatever did the job -- it becomes a party to the further process of co-creation. So, "human" is real and distinct enough despite all our origins and functions that seem to point toward our illusory nature. Inasmuch as it is a meaningful pattern in a meaningful relationship with other patterns, a complete product of a co-creation event is quite a force/being to reckon with. Nothing is completely independent, this world (or any other) does not work like that, and creations occasionally cooperate with the creator and occasionally rebel against him or her -- Frankenstein's monster? Archons, Gaya's disastrous creative failure?.. So, humans are not "just" puppets on microbial or viral strings -- a functionally complete pattern cuts the strings on occasion and learns to do its own dance. Or, on occasion, someone/something else cuts them and attaches its own, new strings. That's what I think happened to us. A secondary creation -- archonic, a force opposing DNA-based life -- managed to turn us into its puppets. Where the hope lies, in micro-intervention (which is occasionally heavy-handed -- they might just throw a dead-end project into a waste basket instead of fixing it if the fixing process becomes too energy-inefficient and not worth it), or in our own regained memory of co-creation, of autonomy playing nicely with dependency, free will, with natural limits imposed on it by the free will of others and by that part of existence that is predetermined and immune to anyone's free will -- that I couldn't tell. All I know is, archonic techno-pseudo-patterning, transhumanism, is a death sentence to humanity -- but I don't know how we might backpedal from that short and damning road we're on. My hopes of microbial saviors are not terribly high, to tell you the truth... but stranger things have happened.

There's vast branches of occult expertise known as demonology. Of all the traditions I've familiarized myself with, Islam has the most extensive catalog of demonic entities and procedures for handling them. Some of these entities do behave like bacterial or viral colonies, but others, like patterns put together out of psychological trauma, they somehow self-organize inside the host and occasionally gain a measure of autonomy in the outside world too. I read a very fascinating book at one point, by a Pakistani, Western educated psychiatrist, who took a plunge into the world of demonology when he encountered cases (many of them) that were impenetrable to Western scientific approach but responded nicely to the procedures employed by exorcists -- so he traveled to study what they know and met many of them, and tried to build some bridges between their expertise and skill and the Western scientific paradigm. I have it somewhere, I might refresh my memory if it's somewhere handy, don't remember all the details, just that it made a lot of sense.

OK, here's what happened, for those who need to have the blanks filled. When the OP posted in the lobby, I was about to welcome her by saying that she has one of the three coolest names I've ever heard (the other two being Darita-Rose Pendragon and Florentino Buenaventura, in case anyone's been wondering.) But just as I was about to start typing, my computer screen went blank, then Max appeared on it, you know, if you ever saw him in person, how otherworldly his eyes are, right? -- so he looked at me with those Kryptonite eyes and slowly shook his head, whereupon the screen blinked back to normal. I took it as a sign not to post the welcome. I still like the name, Thea Fortuna. Max is Maoshan. Digging masters' heads out of the graves to receive teachings from those of them willing to teach is highly unlikely as Maoshan procedures for these things go. A Maoshan sorcerer simply does not have to be this crude. In a typical case, he or she will cut an effigy out of the wood of a thunder-stricken tree, and the spirit of the master (or anyone else for that matter) can be trapped within and obey the sorcerer. Those of you who will recall that Max is known as Lama Thunderbolt and skilled in woodwork (he makes Mongolian drums, e.g.) might take a clue about his being prepared, if he so chooses, to use this classical method -- though knowing whether he uses it or not is impossible, Maoshan people reveal exactly as much as they want to and conceal whatever they don't want to reveal -- in all likelihood a much greater amount of information. This comes with the territory. Maoshan is nothing if not secretive -- that's one reason for the incessant rumors around it, from ridiculous to defamatory to, on occasion, movies-inspired. In any event, I would advise anyone who would do so for whatever reason to try to avoid pissing off a Maoshan sorcerer at all costs. At all costs.

Woman -- womb-man, a mannaz (Proto-Germanic for "person" of unspecified gender) with a womb. Man -- derived from mannaz, person, and later reinterpreted so as to equate "person" with "male." Human -- he-man, another reinterpretation, "a person is a male."

It is taoism 101. Sorry if it's being wasted on you, but you weren't my target audience, I know you are not into taoism. I assert the earth is square. I assert it is round. I assert it is flat. I assert it is a torus. I assert it is a spinning top. All you have to do is read my posts in sequence without looking for a way to troll them and try to get what I'm getting at. It isn't even taoism 101. It is reading comprehension 101. I know you can do it. I'm rooting for you -- right into the spiral earth, just as my taiji teacher taught me to root. We call it peng force. Good luck.

Which is why you may want to go back to that post of mine -- the whole point of it was the "looks like" bit being irrelevant. Which is why I brought up saccades and movies and stuff. To illustrate a point. The overall point being that when taoists say "the earth is square," the last thing they concern themselves with is what it "looks like." It doesn't look like anything separately from who's looking and where he/she/it is looking from. I see it as simply unscientific, to base something as fundamental as "the shape of the earth" on what it "looks like" to just one species inhabiting it -- through the eyes of someone else at that. At the Museum of Science and Technology in LA, I once looked through a special apparatus they had to imitate the eyesight of a bee -- you could see the whole premises with the help of that device (rather cumbersome, not a pair of goggles or anything, a floor-mounted machine -- too complex for a pair of goggles, at least at that time) and see what the Museum and its visitors look like to a bee. I can assure you it was one of those "instant learning" moments. Nothing can be farther from the human vision than what you saw -- does it mean the bee does not "really" exist, or the museum, or both? The shape of the museum seen by the bee had absolutely nothing in common with what humans see there...

As of October 27, 2015, Google Scholar returns for him an h index of 21,[2] with a total number of citations equal to 1012. According to NASA ADS, his h index is 19, with 843 citations (the number of non-self citations being 661). The tori[3] index is 26.9, and the riq[3] index is 215. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society (AAS). In 2008 - 2009, he served as the Chair of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the AAS. He has also co-authored the following book: ^ Kopeikin, S.; Efroimsky M. & Kaplan G. (2011). Relativistic Celestial Mechanics of the Solar System. Wiley-VCH, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-527-40856-6.

Ack... didn't you read my "Not doing any homework to prove anything to anybody" declaration of independence from being given assignments by whoever is not my Teacher?.. Do take a look -- it's in WeiWuWei. Luckily, this one is a no-brainer -- take a look here: http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/earth_precess.htm complete with the picture of the spinning-top Earth which alas refused to post in my original post on the subject. Also, even though I'm not under oath when I post at a banter forum, I normally tell no lies -- also, even though I am a practicing taoist with many connections in the non-3D realms, I don't maintain any imaginary friends in the human realm and never gave you any reasonable grounds to suspect me of either. I told you plainly that I got this info from a friend who is an astrophysicist. He specializes in celestial dynamics and relativity, and is currently working as a research scientist for the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.. I got the spinning top from him in response to a private inquiry completely unrelated to this-here thread, but thought it's a nice bit to share. (Who'd have guessed...) The primary (and only) reason for the inquiry was that I needed something astronomically correct for a particular episode of my sci-fi novel under construction, and wanted to consult him on that so whatever it turns into in the literary form has some tangible scientific backing should anyone want to question it. As an aside, that's what I always do if I'm not a specialist in the subject under investigation -- I consult specialists. Both kinds, incidentally, the orthodox and the dissenting/unorthodox/alternative, to know both sides of the story before arriving at my own agree/disagree conclusions -- not just one as our esteemed detractors like to do. Oh, and what I gave you, that spinning thingie, that's orthodox science. Just a field you are not familiar with. Can you live with that, or d'you reckon I owe you something else?..

That's an easy one. It is always where one of the Nine Flying Stars occupies the center of the Luoshu-derived magic square. Of course we have to keep in mind that spacetime is a fractal, so the center of a particular point in it aligns with the center of a greater span of it, and that one, with a still greater one, but all of it is pretty orderly and accessible to Xuan Kong (spacetime) feng shui analysis. Right now, the center of the universe for a 20-year period (you can find it for any larger period too, but we limit ourselves for our purposes) that started in 2004 and will end in 2023 is Star 8, a good one overall, but the Star of the Year 2015 (the one that aligns with the period star to sit in the center of our spacetime year "2015") is 3, not so good... The monthly one for right now that aligns with that one is 6, an OK one in this period, and for the day, Star 4, also an OK one. Tomorrow, obviously, the period, year, and month Center of the Universe will remain the same, but the Day Star will change to 3.

It's the DNA... and it's not limited to this planet. It acts as a receiver-transmitter of organized (i.e. "conscious," i.e. capable of establishing "meaningful" relationships between phenomena) thought-matter-spirit-memory with unlimited range in space and time. By the way, this is why the I Ching works, and this is how it works.

We are not I, they are not we, and what I think we should do is stop using them interchangeably. This would be the beginning of some clarity in at least some of those sore excuses for collective minds. I, me, don't have to stop using insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other mass murder weapons because I, me, never use them, never did and never will. Antibiotics -- I, me, don't get multimillion dollar grants or I would have offered something much better, our their antibiotics are an obsolete drug, expired, Fleming is dead and the efficiency of antibiotics is a small percentage of what it used to be circa his time. They kill far more than heal but still spectacularly drain all funding and all the brightest minds (that are powerless in this-here social set-up unless funded) away from what heals but is not patentable -- e.g. macrofagi, which don't go out of style and you don't build up a global ecosystem of drug-resistant microorganisms... no one is funding the research. Focused rather than broad-spectrum weapons of selective destruction can be obtained from plants -- the Under-Destruction rain forest contains remedies for everything, only less than 1% of its medicinal plants used by the locals were ever studied pharmaceutically and even that tiny drop yielded such heavyweights as quinine and general anesthesia, to name a couple. And there's no need to study in such a manner as though we are playing make-believe -- let's pretend thousands of years of human experience that went before were all clueless, primitive, "unscientific" endeavors, and let's start by doubting everything they ever did and testing something from scratch, and if it works, let's create a synthetic version of it -- 'cause we can't patent the straight-up medicine, we have to alter it so it is less efficient but someone, some we (what kind of we?..) can own it. For humans -- if humans were the ones calling the shots -- there's no need to do this. Instead there's a need to preserve and learn, and trust millennia-reviewed rather than ulterior-motivated-peer-reviewed "evidence based medicine." You want evidence, you have to know who to ask. If you designate who to ask as "primitives," you will never know what they knew, and when they are gone and their "evidence" is gone together with the plants that contained it, you're stuck with mediocre drugs that do more harm than good and progressively so -- in my native tongue there's a saying, "a cannon used against sparrows," that's our their medicine. And most sparrows just fly away while the whole building they were "infesting" collapses. But we can't get rid of these because we they aren't offering anything else. You have to have something, right? We just don't feel we have to have an opinion, an incentive, a voice -- it's all taken care of by them. I do believe an average microbe is smarter than an average consumer. Even as an individual.

Methinks the illusion is to reduce to one or the other something that is both simultaneously. The cognitive process that allows one to grasp how it can be both, and not reducible to either, can be experienced in some "non-ordinary" states, but can't be explained with any sequential language, nor grasped with sequential step by step logical analysis. However, it's available to some people under some circumstances. We are both, and reduction to either is a grave mistake under all normal and most "non-ordinary" circumstances.