Taomeow

Interesting topic. I like the taoist definition of what it means to be human: to be human, you have to walk like a human, stand like a human, sit like a human, and lie down like a human. Notice this leaves out the minor distinctions like "feel" or "think" or "believe." It is enough to meet the four requirements above to be human -- and not meeting them means you're not, regardless of what you feel, think or believe. I think (while sitting like a human I hope) that the whole is neither equal to the parts nor necessarily greater. The whole can be smaller than the parts it is made out of -- consider mob mentality and behavior compared to the mentality and behavior of one normal human. The latter is definitely "bigger" -- not in physical size but in the size of her humanity. Even if we are put together out of trillions of bacteria, this does not mean that we are a sum total of their mentality -- we can be something else, something new. This is another taoist law (contracted by Feuerbach via taoism-aware Leibniz and, for some reason, by Marx and Lenin enamored with Feuerbach) -- the transmutation of quantity into quality. A human is not the same as a bunch of trillion of microbes randomly scattered over a random surface. The organizing principle, the pattern, is what emerges as a new quality that may have little or nothing to do with the quantity that has produced it. A diamond is not a piece of coal, even though, technically speaking, it is. A pearl is not a band-aid applied around a grain of sand that bothered the oyster, even though, technically speaking, it is. What I suspect is NOT human is the force that peddles sterilization of this world by all means at its disposal. From dozens of different antibiotics fed to livestock and sprayed on the fields, and then "disinfectants" that sterilize every bit of food we eat and much of the indoor air we breathe, and then irradiation of food (and of us on every convenient occasion -- e.g. at the airport) to kill whatever wasn't killed with "disinfectants," to spraying whole countries with Malathion that kills astronomical (no, bigger than that) numbers of live-creating little ones, to Corexit and so on doing this to the oceans, to doctors prescribing antibiotics in such amounts and with such frequency that we get therapeutically significant doses of them from our municipal water when we take a shower, to chlorinated everything that moves till it's perfectly dead (and stinky and carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic), to a film of murderous goo on every apple and every carrot you buy, to -- well I better stop or the coincidence theorists will rush in to call me a conspiracy theorist. Who needs to be slapped with this shitty meme. Pure shit, and yet so popular. Like nearly everything else that is pure shit. What I worry about is not that we're put together out of a symbiotic bunch of climate zones -- this is normal. I worry about internal deforestation that closely matches external one. THIS is what strips us of humanity. A climate disaster inside the body -- and billions of bodies that are seldom seen walking, sitting, standing or lying down as human anymore. I notice all the time...

The Earth's axis rotates (precesses) just as a spinning top does. The period of precession is about 26,000 years. I got this from a friend who teaches astrophysics. This is "really" modern science -- however, Hipparchus first proposed the precession of the axis in 130 B.C., and estimated the period at 26,000 years. If you lived off planet and the saccadic movements of your eyes had a periodicity of 26,000 years instead of 200 milliseconds that is their current rate, you would clearly see a spinning top-shaped Earth. When you watch a movie, you see a smooth lifelike sequence of motion on the screen -- however in reality it all consists of still frames with gaps between them. Synchronizing the sequencing of these frames and gaps with your visual perceptions is what makes you believe you are watching a movie, rather than the 16 still frames in each one foot of 35 mm film, with 16 gaps of nothing per every foot of it you are really watching every second of it. Any shape you perceive that is not time-tuned with your perception apparatus appears to be what your perceptions make it appear to be. And if it is time-tuned with your perceptions, it appears to be something else. Yet neither one is "reality." The still frames on the 35 mm film don't move, contrary to the evidence of your vision. And by the same token, the pictures of earth on the film don't rotate, contrary to the evidence of your mind. What is real? The real question is, what is real?..

Try the work of physicist Nassim Haramein. He's unafraid to be unorthodox even though he's paid all his dues to the standard "peer reviewed" science before climbing out of that box. And he asserts (and proves) everything is a torus -- galaxies, stars, planets, all the macrocosm and all the way down to the microcosm. His theories dovetail nicely with the Russian torsion fields field and the taoist cosmology of yin-yang and wuxing and bagua and ganying, as well as with quite a lot of the sacred-geometrical goodies that folks like Isaac Newton and Niels Bohr alike kept in their back room, away from the prying eyes. I've listened to hours of his lectures a few years ago, you can probably find something of interest on Youtube. He also has a DVD for lay folks -- http://www.amazon.com/Black-Whole-Nassim-Haramein/dp/B004CYVZ18/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1446251753&sr=1-1&keywords=black+whole+book

I didn't watch the second one, but the first one is about 1) offering a very incorrect picture of the behavior of gravity in case of flat earth -- a model that ignores the motion of the earth in space (let alone spacetime) and its rotation around its own axis, and 2) adding a rather prudent view of the facts that are the standard set used to prove the earth is round, correctly pointing out that the facts and the theory that uses them toward its own proofs are not the same, and that a different theory -- that of the flat earth -- can successfully use the same observable facts to prove its own points.

Mine was made in a Chinese village specializing in jians for generations, and whatever they put into its qi, I felt right away. I wanted to give it a name, so I meditated on it and came up with "inexhaustible well," "exuberant spring," "water-maker." Asked my teacher what would sound good, he said, it already has a name. Dragon Well. Here, it says so on the blade, in plain Chinese. Face palm...

On your youtube page, you can go to History ( the left upper side of the screen), click on that, then you get an option "Clear Watch History." Click on that. It will ask you if you're sure, confirm it. Flat earth recommendations will go away. I clean up this way after watching anything at all -- I never once got a recommendation I cared to follow, they ain't no mind readers, those artificially-intelligent/naturally-dumb applications.

Not to mention the White Lotus Rebellion, led by a doctor of taoist medicine, and even the original Triads leaders (before non-taoists turned them into what is reputed to be a gangsta kind of possey.) But more importantly, taoist priests of skill, attainment and courage (a prerequisite that does not always come with the territory of taoism but is always welcome when it does) were employed for centuries to do battle in the spirit realms, as exorcists, ghost busters, demon fighters and demon eaters, possession cleaners -- in other words, warriors for health for the individual and the community. Occasionally this was necessary to do in the human realm too. "Did you kill a king?" they asked the author of the I Ching. "No, we executed a tyrant," he responded. Meaning -- removed the abuser of the mandate of Heaven and restored tao where it had been destroyed. Very taoist in my book -- and there's no book more taoist than the I Ching in the Taoist Canon, into which it was included long before Laozi, Zhuangzi et al. It is ridiculous to doubt that taoists will fight for the right reasons at the right time. This is the cat's meow of wei wu wei.

All taoists (real ones) I know are martial arts practitioners, whether this makes them warriors is debatable, but I am sure a martial taoist is much closer to tao than an armchair one. Whoever didn't notice tao do battle wasn't paying attention. And is not a mother. Let alone Mother of All Things.

Taoism 101 to the rescue. Up and down are always possible to determine by taoist methods. Give me any space in the universe that contains any form and substance, I'll tell you where its up is and where its down is. I promise. Because taoism deals with spacetime rather than space separated from time (unlike our idealistic sciences separated from reality), "round" and "flat" are meaningless for describing space without time alone, because there's no such thing in existence as space without time alone. (We leave the realms of no-shape and of no-substance and of no-shape-no-substance out of it for the moment... there we can have no time, no space -- but nowhere can we have space without time or time without space.) So when we say "round" and "square," "flat" and "spherical," etc., we don't mean "like a ball" or "like a pancake." We mean the vector of change in spacetime. So when we say "the earth is square," we mean it exists in four seasons, the changes of the earth are seasonal and since the major ones are four -- Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, aka Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation -- we assert it is square in spacetime. Its changes are fourfold, "square" is a shortcut to saying "its changes arrive at one of the four consecutive destinations, like the corners of a square, before making a turn toward a new direction." Or as I put it before, the spirit and the math of earth in spacetime of changes are square. So a snapshot of the earth is a ball? Maybe. Maybe not. I've no idea. I haven't observed it first hand. Does it matter? Can it predict anything about November, July, harvest, planting time, Monarch butterfly migration, the Santa Ana season and the sirocco, the bikini or the fur coat to buy, the mosquito bite or the frostbite, the flooding of the Nile or the availability of persimmons? No. But if I know the earth is square, does it? Oh yes. Every earth year -- and with periodicity that's squarely in your face if you are making appropriate observations and calculations, every earth-heaven cosmic year. That's because the earth is square regardless of the shape of the physical planet earth. That's because Earth is not a lump of space inside an idealistic illusion of no-time. Earth is a spacetime phenomenon of changes in reality itself. Earth is real in spacetime only. Make a very good note of it and don't bother a taoist with this pointless idealistic nonsense about its physical shape in some time-purged change-removed space that does not exist in reality. It's not the physical shape of your body on a selfie taken right now that is "you." You were a little thing with gills and a tail once, swimming in water in someone's round belly -- remember? Was that shape not the real scientific you as opposed to the picture you just took with your phone?.. And if that picture you took today attests to your obesity but by next year you lose 49 lb and your belly that is round as a ball becomes flat as a pancake, does it mean you lost your scientific definition of what "you" means?.. So which shape is "your real one and only shape?" And which one is Earth's?... Huh?.. Did it ever matter, for a million years, whether the snapshot of this place is a flat picture of a ball? No. Did it ever matter, for a million years, that the spacetime of this place behaves in a square fashion, with four turns every time, a million times in a row? Yes. We wouldn't be here if we hadn't learned to notice. The path is steep and narrow and sharp as a razor blade, the sage said. Did he mean the shape of the path in space? No. And if they showed him a snapshot of a smooth, flat, eight-lane wide highway, would he reconsider his assessment? No. Neither do I. Spacetime rocks. Yin and yang rock (they are your clue as to how to tell up from down anywhere in the universe.) Taoism rocks. Modern science is flat as a pancake. I hope it grows out of its time-less diapers soon or it will follow the reading the I Ching gives me whenever I ask about this or that "scientific breakthrough": "It flares up, dies down, gets thrown away."

I tried. But Copernicus and Galileo, right or wrong, aren't con men to me, nor were they crazy -- even though they were called those names by their contemporaries who didn't believe the earth and the sky were what our contemporaries believe they are. MY contemporaries -- and I do differentiate between people whose mind is open and people whose mind is open so wide that stuff starts falling out -- who go against the grain also occasionally earn my respect. I don't buy every crazy idea out there just to be unconventional, but I know for a fact that the craziest con artistry is accomplished by breeding the kind of constituency that buys ANY orthodoxy and denounces ANY unorthodox idea. Buy anything just because it's advertised by the Big Brother, no less?.. I'm not always in a rush to the final sale. I have my own perceptions about me, I don't need them to tell me who is a con artist and who is mistaken and who is the new Copernicus. That kind of a problem with me.

How so?

I don't know. Does it uplift you? I found it profoundly tragic on many levels.

The yellow crane has long since gone away, All that here remains is Yellow Crane Tower. The yellow crane once gone does not return, White clouds drift slowly for a thousand years. Mao Zedong, 1927

The opposite of punishing is rewarding. I noticed you like to reward, on occasion, those who successfully demonstrate their mastery of conditioned responses, and punish those who fail to. You are far from alone in this, so I'm guessing it must be somehow rewarding.

Nungali, we have a Mystical Poetry Thread -- you may want to contribute there with these while you're on a roll.

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I asked a Chinese friend and he explained it, but I forget how. Many Chinese words are like that. An "old mouse" means a rat. How do they tell a rat from a mouse of advanced age? Context. What if there's no context? Then it doesn't matter what it is, things don't exist by themselves, without the context of other things. A brilliant language. Much closer to reality than ours. The "rabbit" of the Chinese horoscope is "cat" in the Vietnamese one, derived from the Chinese but retaining an earlier version. In reality both are metaphors referring to other metaphors referring to reality. The month of the Rabbit is in spring, when seeds start awakening and two tiny leaves sprout on top -- which resemble a rabbit's ears, or a cat's. So "Rabbit" stands for this metaphor for spring -- rabbit-like ears sticking out of this place at this time. But "Spring" itself can refer to the actual season but also be a metaphor for something bigger and more universal: for the part of the cosmic cycle corresponding to "beginning, conception, life showing up." That's why they have "seasons" in the universe -- nothing is literal, everything is context-dependent -- and therefore accurate. I am going to give up on the western way to do thinking altogether one of these days... it's so flat, you think flat earth is bad, well I say flat thought is worse. Hard to explain... but I've been doing things taoist for so long that every time I have to backpedal into how western cognition is organized, I get whiplash.

The conformist, too often, feels compelled to respond to voices in his head that seem to challenge his position, instead of to what is actually being said. This makes for a tedious exchange of opinions because nothing is being exchanged. I say A, the conformist says, NOOOO, NOT E!!!!!! You believe in E!!!! and it means you wear a tin hat! I try reminding him, hey, I didn't say I believe in E, I said A. The conformist goes, hahaha, she believes in E, conspiracy theorist! No, I try for the third time, I said A, I didn't say anything about E, you're hearing voices. It's no use. The conformist hears voices. That's the voices of his opponents who are also him -- the disowned, silenced him. The part that knows that I said A but pretends I said E, because it has to prove that E is wrong -- because his B depends on it. It gets tedious... but I have tremendous compassion for people who can't hear what is being said and wind up talking to themselves all their lives. Such loneliness, even amidst thousands of people. No connections possible -- people are just used as sounding boards for externalizing the argument between their conforming self and their real self. And the battle rages on...

You are human race, I am human race -- does this give you knowledge of what I had for breakfast this morning? Of what a classmate of mine who lives in Austria wrote in her email to me today? Of whether Putin is conspiring with Biden Junior, or with Angela Merkel, or recklessly opposing them both? Of anything at all that someone knows that they don't want to tell you (e.g., I'm sure your wife is faithful to you, I would be -- but if she cheated, wouldn't she want to keep it to herself?..) See, "we" holds no water if it is fictitious, metaphorical, poetic, imaginary. "We" use cell phones believing that "we" invented them for ease of communication. However, the military list them among the "nonlethal weapons based on microwaves emission technology." Which is correct? There's different "we," see -- same technology, different applications, different purposes. And one is not informing the other. "We" use asbestos to insulate our homes and keep ourselves warm, but "we" who inhale the dust use it to get sick and die. "We" manufacture lead-based paints for our homes and children's toys for pretty colors, but "we" the children use them for to get brain damage. "We" then prohibit the use of lead paints but "we" add fire retardants to mattresses "we" sleep on, and "we" the children sleeping on them also get brain damage. "We" went to war in Iraq but "we" didn't believe it when "we" said that "we" are fighting for our freedom there. And so on. "We" are a catch-all, "the human race" is a catch-all, and "someone" knows how to use it to make you believe that technology serves "we the people." But believe you me, there's "we" who think the opposite is true, and they are not in any way inadequate compared to your "we," but they -- us -- me -- beg to differ.

Mine is spiral -- like every single bone in my body, or yours -- shaped by the real (not snapshot/still frame) shape of energies of this world. I keep working on generating the spiral peng force in my taiji. When I get it right, it feels -- like home.

Technology is not an illusion, but it is not necessarily based on science you are told it is based on. Technology can use things without understanding them. No one knows what electricity or magnetism really are. No one. And yet we base a helluva lot of technology on them. And this technology does not inform us about what's going on on the level of reality anymore than your lifting a cup of coffee to your lips is based on your deep understanding of biology, physiology, biochemistry, biophysics, and so on. You just have the technology, the know how. You don't have the science, and you don't need it to use this technology. If you limit the claims to "this model of reality we currently accept does not interfere with our use of technology," I'll agree. The model of reality (flat earth, round heaven) used by Admiral Zheng He didn't interfere with his use of technology either -- he sailed all over the earth but he didn't think he sailed "around the earth," he thought he sailed "to the four corners of the earth." So what?.. Technology working proves nothing about the theory. Zip.

Define "WE." You seem to have participated in all these endeavors, and that's how you know. Wow! What a life of adventure and accomplishment! If you haven't, you shouldn't say "we" about those adventures and accomplishments -- moreover, you shouldn't say they actually took place, this is hearsay and nothing but, very unreliable, courts e.g. refuse to consider such evidence.. The only correct way to present your findings is to point out their source. Say something like "we are told by them that..." yada yada. Try to rewrite your passage in this manner. See if it is anywhere as convincing when you stick to the facts -- "someone told me that..." but "I personally have never witnessed..." as it is when you include yourself into "we" as if they have included you. They did not. They did not. They did this -- or something entirely else -- absolutely without you. You only have their word for it, nothing else. But then they told you "we" as though you did it together with them. This is mass hypnosis, friend. You have been hypnotized to believe you are part of some "we" that does all the things that "you" personally haven't the foggiest about. I'm not saying they're lying. I'm saying you are, not on purpose, just the way this particular hypnotic trance suggests. You weren't there didn't do that and yet you say "we" did this and that. So, there's not "two kinds of people" of your description. There's two kinds of people of real distinction: those who think -- and stick to the facts personally known to them while doing this; and those who repeat what they were told to think -- and thus replace fact with fiction, then hold on to this fiction for dear life because that's all they have to show for a lifetime of running their brain on idle, using someone else's instead. Ancient or modern doesn't matter. If you think you know things that you only know under the hypnotic suggestion of "we," try examining what you know if you remove this suggestion -- what you, personally, know. I personally know taoist numerology and cosmology, that's why I think the earth, not in its physical shape that doesn't matter much, but in its abstract mathematical manifestations, its "spirit," the source of its physical manifestations, is square. I have no opinion about its physical shape because I wasn't there to witness, and I only believe what I know myself, from having been there done that thought it through on the actual facts' terms -- what I, personally, have had my mind, body and all their faculties register at the time of occurrence of a "fact." If I was asleep in bed, it doesn't count. If someone told me it happened while I wasn't there, it doesn't count. Is all.

You mean you don't know what happened to the guy in the back seat?.. I say forget all the banter about whether the Earth is round, ovoid, toroid, boloid, square, or none of the above, and watch Night On Earth pronto! How on Earth did you miss it!

Well, of course, if you look closely, sheep and goats are not the same -- why even not all sheep are the same. Some are special.