Taomeow

Yup, I saw it too, they are like la peau de chagrin, those evil timelines -- the more you use them for fulfilling evil desires and abusing their power, the more they shrink -- until with the last one, something like "make unprecedented profits off unleashing WWIII on the suckers," they go poof -- and disappear. If ours was that Balsac's genius metaphor -- which I'm very sure it is -- I'd say we have a quarter of a millimeter of it left, compared to its original immense size, the size of a galaxy of galaxies. Still, I wouldn't want to wait. This last quarter of a millimeter is packed with over seven billion people and all the uncounted animals and plants still hanging on. I wouldn't want them to have to live through the agony before disappearing together with their criminally used-up timeline. I want to spare them. So, one can just put that ever-shrinking skin back on the animal from which it had been ripped off, the animal called Earth. I would try to reverse the timeline at the point when Earth was still fully alive and not tortured, not flayed.

Oh, I'll use it, but not in the manner of those who commissioned the creation and ordered the use of this equipment. What I've got for them is worse than any torture they ever got their evil fix of adrenochrome from administering. I will punish them with uncreation. Not only will their reign of pain and terror unleashed on most humans in most times in most places, the only thing that made us what we are today, never come to pass. I will turn the most powerful shamans of prehistory (and powerful they were, verily) against them, I will so horrify my beloved prehistoric sisters and brothers with the future of humanity that will unfold unless they stop it, that they will stop it for all eternity. It is a well-known fact in the magical sects of taoism that the worst of vendettas are taken into the afterlife and go on for thousands of years if necessary. I'll do something even worse than that to the overlords of pain. I will have them banished into the uncreateable forever. Certain potentially possible things have an innate prohibition on being created -- e.g. division by zero, or kosher pork, or diamond juice, or pot-smoking sharks, stuff like that. I will get our civilization of the "historic" as we call it period right into that category. I have a plan.

There's a Russian sci-fi novel, written in the 1970s and titled "A Billion Years To The End Of The World." It has a bunch of scientists for its protagonists, and all they are doing throughout the novel is trying to figure out why unrelated, seemingly random events start happening in their lives that boil down to, they can't work anymore. Eventually it becomes clear that each one of them is about to enter the uncharted territory of the mind where it's getting apparently powerful enough for the universe to notice, where this human mind of theirs is trespassing on the mind of tao, so to speak, dropping its marbles across the fence and onto the playground of the makers and destroyers of galaxies. Tao may have ignored our messing up all things balance while we messed them up locally -- globally -- but when we are showing signs of not stopping at that, when we are getting ready to assault -- who knows what universal balance which we are not wise enough to know yet are already getting strong enough to damage -- the universe starts defending itself. The methods it uses are so "unscientific" though that all the scientists start waxing philosophical -- and still can't work. And one of them commits suicide brought about, apparently, by the need to stop his own mind from arriving at a solution to a particular problem...

Similarly, until I needed it for taiji neigong, there was no point running it, once I did, there was no need to imagine it. I didn't practice any specific exercises, it was more like a waigong to neigong transition of awareness while doing the form, and then it gets "embodied" and you can put it on autopilot, and you can turn it on or off as needed. Control is crucial. I've heard too many stories of all kinds of side effects, from mildly annoying to life-disrupting, to favor "learning" it "just because you can." Yes you can -- but can you turn it off?.. Can you turn it off when it's draining your qi instead of circulating it? Do you know where you're "leaking?" Do you know where you are "blocked," "deviated," "entangled," "stuck," and how to fix it before running the MCO?.. That's the part a book or DVD may overlook.

Too late for that -- it's in the water supply and in the ocean. In the fish. In the poultry and livestock fed by-products of fish industry. In the vegetables irrigated by mercury-laden water. In the blood and nerve tissue and CNS of everyone who ever received childhood vaccinations -- since before birth if mom got them too, and her mom before her. And of those who either have mercury in their dental fillings or underwent a procedure to remove them. A mere mortal can't win against mercury these days, it keeps going retrograde. But my taoist teacher knows how to break it. I'm learning.

I would load my time machine with an assortment of implements of torture -- here's a few, out of many hundreds in existence, I would want to show Boot Brazen bull Breaking wheel Breast ripper Catapelta[citation needed] Choke pear Cattle prod Electroshock weapon Heretic's fork Instep borer Iron chair Iron Maiden Judas Chair Kia quen / Tean zu Mancuerda Parrilla Pau de Arara Pendulum[1] (of disputed historicity) Picana Pillory Pimp stick Rack Rope Scavenger's daughter Scold's bridle Stocks Tablilla Thumbscrew Tongue shredder Tramp chair Tucker telephone Wooden horse and explain how they were used for Abacination Beatings and physical violence Blinding with light Boiling Bone breaking Branding Castration Chinese water torture Choking/Strangling Combing Crushing Cutting Denailing Disfigurement Drowning Dunking Flagellation Flaying Foot roasting Foot whipping Force-feeding Genital mutilation/forced circumcision Hamstringing Kneecapping Keelhauling Mutilation Noise (see Sound entry) Oxygen deprivation Pitchcapping Pressure points Rat torture Riding the Rail Sexual assault Sawing Scalping Scaphism Sleep deprivation Sound (extremely high volumes, dynamic range, low frequency, high pitched noise, intended to interfere with rest, cognition and concentration). Starvation Strappado/squassation (also known as "reverse hanging" and "Palestinian hanging") Stress positions Ta'liq hanging from a metal bar. Tarring and feathering Thumbscrew (torture) Tickle torture Tooth extraction Walling Water cure Waterboarding And I would explain to them why the single most important story they should start telling their children is not the story of the past but the story of the future, the future they want to avoid at all costs. After everybody has thoroughly understood what those tools and methods are used for in the future, I will of course blow up the whole lot. But then, if what I'm trying to accomplish will indeed happen and the story of the future to avoid at all costs will take root, the tools I'd brought along will simply disappear, because the future will have been changed so that they never appear.

This science is a joke. When they talk the macro level they keep adjusting the picture by billions of light years of distance and billions of yeas of time every ten to fifteen years, upholding nary anything they were saying before. On the micro level, same deal. Their picture of an atom used to look like a bunch of loops a few distinct electrons make around the nucleus. Now it looks like the nucleus surrounded by a cloud of possibilities, "electron cloud." Pretty much nothing in common with the old model. The way to predict the future is to study Time and Pattern. We have nascent sciences of Pattern (chaos, fractals, power laws) in their diapers, and we have classified sciences of Time (jump rooms, Montauk chair, Project Pegasus and so on), of which no one knows much except (and only empirically at that) the guy I'm voting for when he announces his presidential candidacy, Andy Basiago. Without these crucial pieces of the universe puzzle, it's a game of hypotheses every bit as brutal and pointless as the game of thrones. Which is why I don't bother planning for a Western scientific future, and am working on a taoist immortalist one. They once asked a taoist immortal, "Miss, what will you do when our sun goes supernova? Aren't you afraid?" To which she responded, coyly lowering her pretty eyes, "Afraid of the supernova?.. I AM the supernova."

@ Mandrake:

Well, yes, most people are thoroughly confused by now as to what yin and yang mean (if they ever think of stuff in terms of yin and yang at all that is). Another anecdote while I'm on a roll. A friend of mine who is French but has been permanently living in CA for a bunch of years went back to visit family in Paris. She used to work in fashion there, but it's been years since she last wore anything other than what a natural-things-favoring kind of California woman will wear -- T-shirt, jeans , sneakers. Her uncle looked her over and said, "You look good, but... sheesh... do you have to dress like this?.. You would look so much better if you wore heels!" Without missing a beat, she reparteed, "So would you!" This left the uncle quite speechless... he's not a very tall man. She told me that in about the times of the three musketeers, it was men who wore high heels, to enhance their butt... And in ancient Rome, it was prostitutes -- required by law to wear high heels -- to make them tall enough for the potential client to spot them from afar, and to tell them apart from women who are not seeking clients.

Ha, I know this one well! I got it on a number of occasions over the years whenever I consulted the I Ching about highlighting my hair or investing into a particularly expensive moisturizer or suchlike. Most of the time the I Ching approved of my plan. There's nothing wrong with "adornment" -- in fact, very serious feng shui masters tend to favor external presentation enhanced with certain adornments (not the ones permanently altering the body though) because, the argument goes, your outer surface is your yang, your external interface with the world, and as such matters, and must be respected and supported. Any permanent "adornments" also enhance yang, but we don't need to enhance yang all the time for all purposes. Which is why you may wear lipstick to a social function but not to meditation, not to a good night's sleep, not to singing your child a lullaby, not to situations that favor withdrawing inward, looking and feeling within rather than "interfacing." So the I Ching won't say "no" to highlighted hair, but only because the decision is not irreversible, the yang enhancement is not permanent. If at a later date it doesn't work as intended anymore, there's always the "back to nature" option. I think it's not a bad criterion when trying to decide what to do or not to do for "adornment."

Yeah, not Chinese though, American woman. (My friend is Chinese but he lives here in CA.). When I was in China, I marveled at the multitude and variety of naturally beautiful faces, especially at things I hadn't seen in the thoroughly plastic SoCal -- well, not so much "in a long time" as "ever:" really thick regal eyebrows, and in the Muslim quarter, eyebrows that grow together forming a magnificent bird with its wings spread to the temples and its beak looking down the nose (here 7/8 of the volume of such eyebrows would be exterminated with extreme prejudice, after contemptuously labeling them a "unibrow"), teeth that follow the smile rather than doing their own thing, as they do here because the dentist has shaped them to a standard that the facial muscles will never be able to harmonize with... Faces that instantly tell a story. "Peasant, no future in the countryside, moved to the big city to work hard toward being happy." "Scholar, thirsty for knowledge, hungry for culture." "Mother, feed them well, put my heart and liver in every bowl of rice, love them with all I've got." "Tough cookie, started out with nothing, but will get everything because I will never give up fighting for my dreams." And on and on -- a caleidoscope of faces that tell stories about who these people are. And that's who we really are. Our stories. If the only story we have to tell is the story of how we rewrite and edit it, approaching our own body as the text to rewrite and edit, and photoshop and repaint, and edit again, and again, that's a story too... but it gets old after a few hundred million repetitions. Don't you think?..

Was having dinner with a friend whose biography I'm thinking of writing someday, not so much for his own story as for the history of his ancestors, one of the most powerful families in China in the 400 years preceding the revolution. A couple were sitting at the table next to ours, and the woman had all the telltale signs of having altered absolutely everything she could about her body, face, and hair, in order to look young glamorous Hollywood. My friend is a great fan of the ancient Chinese art of gossip, of disassembling any person under his scrutiny with innocent cruelty of a child tearing apart a fly to see how it's put together. He treated me to a comprehensive analysis of the woman at the next table, from the "products"-heavy top of her head to the bottom of her Louboutin pumps (to die for, especially if the goal is to permanently dislocate one's uterus out of its natural anatomical position by wearing heels this high), and then came the verdict: "Who is she? She has erased absolutely everything about who she is out of herself, except for the fact that she has money. I can see she has money. And I can't see anything else. Who are you, lady? Your eyes say "Botox," your smile says "Restylane," your cheeks say "implants," your teeth say "veneers," your breasts say "silicone," your nails say "acrylic," your hair says "extensions, ammonia," your eyebrows say "wax strips," your eyelashes say "nylon," your handbag, watch, shoes say "money." Who are you?.."

The credit for getting you stoned goes to Tom Petty, ditto for "tattoo too" that gave me an idea of a great way to throw a tantrum: "Tattoo too!.. I want a tattoo too!.. Tattoooooo toooooo!.." I can't have it. I'm a tattoooist.

On the subject of tattoos and music, this popped up in my head:

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Antibiotics are not taken for fun, attention, or to make any sort of statement. They are taken, ideally, when killing intestinal flora is the lesser evil compared to killing the host. Frivolous use of antibiotics, however, e.g. for a cold or flu (as often is the idiotic case) would be in the same category of damaging the body unnecessarily taoists tend to object to. Of course we all are more likely than not to defend the choices we've already made in the past that are irreversible rather than own up to having made a mistake. Easier this way. If I had a tattoo, I'm sure I would be looking high and low for a way to prove that it's not out of line with my taoist paradigm. If I didn't find it, however, I would just drop taoism, because the whole deal is, for me, predicated on being honest with myself. What's the point of fooling the very person you're trying to cultivate?

Sometimes it's useful to find out how old they were when they got the tattoos. They may not be "trashy," they may just be women who once were teenagers who didn't know any better.

The oldest tattoos discovered, on Scythian mummies, appear to have been applied therapeutically, in patterns that follow acupuncture points and meridians, and the material used for application was a mixture of burned medicinal herbs. Used in this manner, tattoos are a medical intervention designed to correct the flow of qi if it requires permanent correction. I believe we've seen many cargo cults in history, and keep seeing them today, where the external attributes of something meaningful are retained but the meaning itself is lost. As for feeling the difference -- I doubt it, unless you are as sensitive to qi as some seasoned taoist practitioners are. Without special training, few people feel the flow of qi in their meridians. However, if you undergo an MRI scan, you are likely to feel the difference -- it depends on the shape of the tattoo and the composition of the ink used, but some will cause intense pain or even a second-degree burn upon exposure. If you believe that you instinctively knew where to apply the tattoo and in what shape so that it is serving a needed purpose, that's possible. I don't think it's the case in most cases though.

Dusty, the filial piety interpretation of this idea may be Confucian, but the origin of it is taoist. Many taoist schools have a prohibition on any voluntary alterations to the body and strict rules against exposure to unnecessary dangers (extreme sports or drunk driving would be in this category, but they frown even upon jogging.) Taoists are not cowards and will do extreme things to their bodies when there's a necessity or a clear cultivational goal. But careless handling is strongly discouraged. It may or may not be disrespectful to parents, but the idea is that a tattoo on the body is a tattoo on the spirit, since unlike in Indo-European modalities, there's no demarcation line between one and the other. The body is spiritual and the basis of the spirit is material; you don't want to alter that on a momentary whim and be stuck with the outcome for an eternity. For the same reason -- body and spirit are one -- taoists don't donate organs nor accept donated organs. (I mean real taoists, not maoists crash-trained to serve as taoists). The practice is thought of as a form of possession. I just saw an arm today freshly decorated with a huge -- outspread to half the arm -- Earlier Heaven bagua. The recipient of the tattoo thought he's done something taoist. In reality he's done something very strange, aside from the tattoo itself. There's two situations in which the symbols of the Earlier and Later Heaven respectively are used as decorations -- not on the body, but on or in the houses of the living, where the Later Heaven bagua will be used -- or the tombs of the dead, where the Earlier Heaven bagua is used. To put a decoration reserved for the dead on a living arm... I dunno... very bad feng shui at the very least. The flow of qi thorugh the meridians can be disrupted if the body is altered unnecessarily. It's interesting that this is not generally the case with scars that are the result of unfortunate accidents or medical interventions -- even if a major meridian is cut, the body, in most cases, will restore it to the side of the scar and maintain it normally. But if the scar or tattoo or implant appears due to one's own choice, the body accepts the choice, and does not attempt to restore the flow of qi in that area. Strange but seems to make sense -- yi leads qi, if your yi, "the will of your mind," decides on cutting off its route, qi can't go against that.

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If I am too afraid to use my powers, I don't deserve them. -- Hiro Nakamura

Doesn't matter what exactly will be used as a trigger, perhaps multiple and seemingly unrelated triggers -- but what matters is that none of the predictive programming in the past fifteen years or so promises anything but trouble ahead. Didn't they raise whole generations on the assumption that, in the immortal words of Dan Quayle, "the future will look better tomorrow?" They don't use that program anymore. The new one goes something like, "don't complain about what's wrong now -- you ain't seen nothing yet. Something is not good, something is not right? -- just wait and see what the real 'not good' is like..."

All of the above. The taoist thought postulates the fourfold cosmic process -- roughly translated as Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation, or put simply, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. It is thought of as universal, but it is also thought of as cyclical -- Consummation, Winter, Death are the end of one cycle but also the beginning of the next. Nothing in the universe comes to a standstill (wuji) forever, being comes from nonbeing -- not once, but continuously. However, in the human world, what comes after death is a big unknown, all we know for sure is that death is "final' as observed on the level of one human life, and of course everybody fears this cessation of life. (Well, except for buddhists who don't think it's politically correct to enjoy life and hope to bail out. ) But if one takes the taoist cognitive paradigm for face value, there's nothing to fear. "What will the great tao make me next? A rat? A rat's liver perhaps? Where can she take me where it's not good?" -- Zhuangzi The fourfold process terminating in stage four, "consummation," and the number 4 being homophonous with the word "death" is one example, out of many, of holographic fields of meaning embedded in the words of the Chinese language. I know very little of it but time and again their insights, play of images, play of ideas sometimes on the level of just one syllable, blow my mind. Most people, however, will just base their perceptions on one topmost level of meaning -- 4=death -- and jump to conclusions, some of which may be justified (I don't believe in "superstitions" being meaningless, unless they are recent -- ancient ones are always meaningful and rooted in observations of natural processes not available to modern people -- I actually collect them and try to follow). But the surface meaning is not the whole story... by far.

OK, I'll throw in a black ball (I owe you one for Genji from another thread ). The number 4 in Chinese is a homophone of the word for "death," which is why it is avoided -- sometimes they even skip it when numbering houses in the street. The movie I referenced is "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." The "heads" the coins keep flipping to against all statistical odds are actually destiny's way of informing them what is about to happen to their own heads. On the bright side, Basher may have been told by the printer that he's going to be an immortal, since page 4 -- death -- was consistently missing. Messengers of fate are often humble, mundane -- but I always try to remember that the queen who dispatches them is anything but.