Taomeow

Here's a few exercises that can help elucidate the meaning of tao. Use your right eye to look into your left eye -- without using a mirror or any other reflective surfaces. Bite your elbow. Give birth to your own mother. It is said that Laozi did. Surely he knew the meaning of tao, since he introduced the term. Take a walk on the beach and look for a piece of glass smoothed down by the waves like a pebble. Once you've found one, find all the matching pieces of that bottle. Once you have them all, glue that bottle whole again so that the seams disappear. It's very doable, to know the meaning of tao, but the catch is, it can only be done. Tao is a doing. She does things a certain way. Once you can do things the way she does, you are it, and whatever your meaning is, is the meaning of tao. Tao has no other meaning.

Spotless, not a "zen thing" and not yoga -- taoist cultivation, gongfu, which can be translated as "achievement through great effort." Taoist cultivation is not only dissimilar but in many cases opposite in its goals and techniques to both. The OP mentioned qigong, which led me to believe that he seeks to explore taoist practices. Qigong is a beginner practice. Neigong and neidan follow. I was talking about that.

If time and patience are infinite, I prefer to do a stretching routine before and a massaging one after absolutely everything. There's no practice that does not benefit from this approach. Sitting routines with movement allowed (or encouraged) are better suited for beginners indeed. For seasoned practitioners, they are simply not challenging enough, and create a habit of "relaxation" but not "cultivation." The latter must be difficult -- "where comfort ends, gong begins." Of course making sure that pain, numbness, discomfort, etc. are in the gong territory rather than the fallout of erroneous body use, poor alignments, incorrect posture, etc., is of paramount importance. This is not easy in its own right, because lots of folks who teach demonstrate (and transmit to their students) very poor habits and challenge the body entrusted them into attrition rather than cultivation. To say nothing of the mind.

Just as May turned two tutors who tooted the flute into toads, spring came.

Make sure your sitting posture, whatever it is, is physiologically sound. There's many "check points" to go over -- if you don't know what they are, find out. When you are done sitting, straighten out your legs slowly and gradually, not abruptly. Slap and rub them vigorously. Rub the soles of your feet too, with pressure. Pummel up and down the outside of your legs, ankle to hip and back, with pressure. Make loose fists and massage your kidneys, in upward-spiraling motions. If after this your numbness is gone and your feet get warm, don't worry about it, it's normal. If not, report back, we'll try to investigate. Good luck!

I guess we could consider "by invitation only" access?.. I'm not trying to invite myself in, who knows how many toes I've stepped on that will have the power to turn into kicking hooves if I cross that border... but Witch is a different story. Invite her, guys, you won't regret it.

I guess if you are shown beyond a statistical doubt that Americans in times of peace and relative prosperity live longer than Africans who only get a break from abject poverty and backbreaking labor (for the lucky ones with a job) in the form of outright famines and never-ending wars, you can infer exactly what you are invited to infer -- that it proves fluoride (or anything else under scrutiny) is harmless. I wonder if on closer inspection you yourself might see the fallacy of this kind of arguments -- repeated over and over as "proof" in all manner of debates whose bottom line is, "we're fine, statistics/scientists/the government/the media tell us that everybody else is so much worse off BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T DO/AREN'T DOING THINGS OUR WAY -- and since we are so much better off, whatever our way is can't be wrong and whatever their way is can't be right."

There's calcium fluoride, a naturally occurring compound that may or may not protect the teeth, depending on a lot of other factors. Tea accumulates it if it's present in the soil. And there's sodium fluoride, a rat poison, and that's what is added to our water, used by dentists, mixed into toothpaste, and added to infant formula. In addition to being a rat poison, in smaller amounts than lethal it's a CNS suppressor that interferes with higher cognitive functions, including moral judgment, and damps down normal emotional responses -- it's a very efficient pacifier if the goal is to have a population zombified pacified, but as for teeth, it also helps keep dentists in business, because unlike calcium fluoride, it causes rather than prevents cavities. Sodium fluoride molecules are very small and that's why the brain-blood barrier is no barrier to them. Calcium fluoride molecules can't and don't harm the brain, sodium fluoride, can and do. In addition to the above, sodium fluoride is carcinogenic in any amounts, i repeat any amounts big enough to measure, no matter how small. The hope is that the cells that turn cancerous on exposure will be promptly detected and destroyed by a healthy immune system -- which is why not "everybody" gets cancer from these daily occurrences. But many do, when the immune system is too overwhelmed and too weak to perform the task. Another noteworthy tidbit. Sodium fluoride is a toxic byproduct of aluminum industries. For a while, they couldn't figure out how to get rid of it because it is so dangerous and there was no acceptable solution to its disposal found until it was proposed to start adding it to our water supply. Problem solved. And back to tea. Unfortunately, tea plants watered with water containing sodium fluoride will accumulate that too, they don't have a choice anymore than we do. This is how one can theoretically get an unhealthy dose of the wrong kind of fluoride with tea. If the plantation was not watered from the same sources as us humans, our livestock, etc., then no worries, any fluoride found in that tea will be the right kind, a beneficial trace mineral calcium fluoride.

Decades; time goes by. No. Time stands still; we go by. Project Pegasus.* *look it up... and vote!!

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Jing is not lost in ejaculation. It's lost in translation.

And for unloading, spin and rotate suitcases till your burden's gone.

Thank you. Glad you like it.

Synchronicity... I was thinking of an old poem today (traced back all the way to the 14th century but still very well-known), in conjunction with some international news I've been following -- but the image that came to me, consistent with my deepest-ever pessimism regarding current global affairs, was not of a marble, but of a nail: For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

A new study shows that people will believe anything they are told if you put the words "A new study shows" in front of it. -- seen on the internet

This is something very controversial -- for a separate thread maybe, someday. Briefly -- it is the assertion of those who researched the origins of "new age religions" that they were (and are) part of various mind-control programs launched by the government over the years. In particular, MK-ultra, a series of mind-control experiments which evolved from the CIA project "Monarch" which evolved from "Operation Paperclip" which utilized nazi scientists for purposes of advancing assorted proprietary agendas (of which only the benign ones became known to the public, like Wernher Von Braun's work for NASA, but not the less publicized ones involving a lot shadier specialists and tasks), branched out into well over a hundred sub-projects, of which creating a "happy happy joy joy make love not war non-judgmental positive-thinking forgiveness embrace-whatever-happens" and so on mentality (reinforced with drugs and trauma and training the subjects -- the general public -- to react to trauma, to what is really happening, in this manner) was one. Examples of who did what toward this mentality spreading on a wide scale are too shocking to give, off the bat, to people who may have learned what they believe from one or more of those seemingly unlikely sources, and this thread is not meant to be "controversial" so I will omit them for now. Oh, and a "shill" is a hired, paid, or mind-controlled agent of influence pretending (or actually believing, due to mind programming) to be a private citizen and supporting or promoting (or defaming and striking down, depending on the task) a particular product or agenda as though it's a personal choice to do so. One of the oldest professions, which however never flourished to the extent it does today.

http://thedaobums.com/topic/37817-re-the-model-for-a-doable-anarch-lets-alpha-test-it/

I agree, the whole idea of using any markers of acknowledgment at all is to facilitate the atmosphere of friendship. My friends say "thank you" to me and I to them in person, or we "like" things about each other -- why not do this online? And I do want to know who my friends are even if they don't feel like commenting extensively. Why post anything at all somewhere where the answer to "who my friends are" is "nobody?" An aside regarding the "judgmental" objections. I don't view "non-judgmental" stances installed into the collective consciousness by MK-ultra shills that ask people to lose their ability to know what they really feel as a spiritual attainment. I like what I like when I like it. I hate what I hate when I hate it. Peg me as antimatter on this matter.

I still like "thank you." And Thelearner's "Outstanding." I wouldn't want 17 buttons though, I think that's an overkill. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OP/Thread Moderator's reminder to Darkstar: This is the Wei Wu Wei, aka Anarch, section. You just told the OP that the subject natter she opened this thread to discuss is "out of line with Daoism." This is not the appropriate section for such comments.

Control of power is not abuse. You exercise control over the power of your appetite every time you refrain from overeating, or give your food to someone who is hungrier. Control is good. Unless it is abused, everything about power is good, including its ability to submit to control, not to run amok, not to turn into an out-of-control force of indiscriminate destruction. Control of your own power that will cause others to accept your leadership is what makes a mother a mother, and the mother of the universe, the mother of the universe. Abuse of power is any use or non-use of power that is done differently from the way nature does it. If you can think of a situation where everything you do will be done exactly the way nature does it -- not "better" than the way nature does it, but exactly AS nature does it -- it means you know how to use power. Anything else you come up with -- anything at all -- constitutes abuse of power. I wasn't kidding when I said we're red-flagged by the universe as too powerless to make it. That's because we haven't used power in ten thousand years. You can't simultaneously use and abuse power. One completely excludes the other. You can't be slightly pregnant. It's that simple. If you can't do things the way nature does things, it means you are abusing power.

Well, if indeed what the button says can be customized, we can perhaps do better than "noteworthy," that was just the first idea. Most words out of context mean different things to different people. But maybe we can come up with something that means roughly the same thing to most people? E.g. a button that says "thank you?" It would be fair to thank whoever contributed something of value to the person reacting. And by the same token it would still be unnecessary to thank everybody for contributing whatever. I've seen lots of contributions that I was grateful for. And I've seen a few which I couldn't forgive myself for even trying to respond to, because it's not words that must be used in such cases, but something like old-fashioned duels. So, I have no problem not thanking someone who took the time and effort to write something for which a couple of centuries ago, if I were the right social stratum and gender, I'd throw a gauntlet in his face. Gratitude can't be enforced, right? But it can feel very nice when earned fairly and given freely, right? So, thank you (Darkstar) for pointing out that we can do better than "noteworthy."

Thank you for your kind words, Dusty.

And I don't mind at all if you stay out of it and feel good about it, I just wanted to make sure you do it for the right reason (being a stubborn young sage) rather than the wrong one (not understanding what it is about).

This section gives a private citizen the powers of the government over what's his or hers. It's akin to overruling the laws that, e.g., prohibit abortions. It takes the right to decide from the government and puts it back in the private hands and hearts. It's akin to abolishing the prohibition. It's akin to ending the war on drugs. It's akin to overruling the recently proposed (or maybe already implemented, don't remember which) horrific law that criminalizes private citizens' owning bulletproof vests.

Marble, I applaud your tactics used to overcome the Buddhist adversary. But I still think you misunderstood the premise of the anarch section. I don't know how those who want to violate it might act, but if what it is for is observed rather than violated, only those words that have no business being spoken to begin with will be removed, words that go against both the stated goals and implied spirit of speaking there. Imagine yourself at a friend's wedding. Imagine that as soon as the bride says "I do" to your friend, you jump from your seat and yell, "you stupid bimbo, you don't know the man as well as I do, I've known him since junior high, he's not going to make you happy, he's lazy, irresponsible, foul-mouthed, and his feet smell. No one respects him! You better change your mind pronto and give him back that cheapo ring he gave you, or you'll be sorry!" Freedom of speech violated if you are thinking all those things but not saying them? And if you do say them, would it be wrong for your friend to delete you from his wedding?.. There's inappropriate speech. You don't tell a child, "your mom is our stupidest employee, everybody makes fun of her behind her back on account of her stupidity and ugliness, did you know that?" You don't tell a guy sitting at a restaurant next to you, "ah, you have those folds under your ears, I see -- so, you are going to die of a heart attack soon, it's a sure sign of severe heart disease." And on and on. Anyone who speaks words that must not be spoken is exercising the freedom to be an asshole, nothing more. I will not support this freedom for any purposes. And you don't need it, I'm telling you you don't. So, think again!