Taomeow

Time to do yoga. Jnana-yoga says maya is no illusion.

I agree -- science is not to blame for having been replaced with cultural imposters masquerading as such, meaningless memes creating the illusion of "getting somewhere good" while being headed in a random institutionalized direction at any given time and changing it frequently at that. Science as we know it is not everything science can be by any stretch of imagination -- and the way we know it is in the shape and form of a fundamentalist religion, different from older ones only in that it changes its precepts way more often. Nothing of what was "science" a hundred years ago is considered science today. Reminds me of a true story -- an episode of a world cognitive neuroscience symposium where a papal nuncio from the Vatican expressed his conviction that what those scientists were doing was writing the scriptures of an alternative religion. He asked the audience, "You are experts in the matters of consciousness and the brain and the mind. So, how you go about determining that someone is dead? There's been many cases in history when someone, e.g., in a deep coma, was buried alive, having been mistaken for dead. How do you go about avoiding this mistake today, with your scientific capabilities?" The scientists go, well, encephalograph, MRI, CAT scan, PET scan... how do you in the Vatican go about it? The papal nuncio goes, well, we've had the same procedure for this for centuries. When a pope seems to have died, it is my job to take a special silver hammer and hit him on the soles and heels of his feet while asking him repeatedly in a very loud voice, "Are you asleep, your holiness?" If I hammer his feet like that for an hour and all the present officials take turns yelling "Are you asleep?" and there's no reply, the pope is then considered dead. The cognitive neuroscientists were rolling on the floor laughing their asses off by then. The nuncio waited for them to have a good laugh, with a smile on his face, and then said, "you're laughing of course at my silver hammer, a scientifically crude tool, admittedly. Now imagine how hard your learned colleagues will be laughing three hundred years from now at your encephalographs and MRI and CAT and PET scans..." As to your other comment: don't know about the Tsez, but the Balkars whom I meant only had one stone age tribe remaining at the time I was there, which managed to reduce communication with the outside world to a minimum (due to living in a place almost impossible to access) -- and for all I know their grammar might be patterned, like the I Ching, on the natural genetic/cosmic code... judging by how very sacred-geometrical the patterns they knit into their wool sweaters are... who knows what those patterns communicate. Maybe the knowledge of how to embody heng, tao's main virtue...

The drive to "know" is a reaction to ignorance. Ignorance is not a natural state. Natural people are incredibly intelligent and know a staggering amount of truths about the world they live in -- truths not theories -- and what we refer to as "primitive" is defined as such based on a very morbid paradigm of what "knowledge" is. Long ago, I've been somewhere in the mountains where a "primitive" group speaks a language with 64 cases (compared to 2 in English, nominative and possessive). Hardly anyone in the world who was not born there can tell what they know because try learning this language -- they send scientists to study and classify it but it's not the same thing as being fluent in one's ability to express anything down to the smallest nuance of change to which we are completely blind because our very language lacks the conceptual power to discern and express these processes. Well, no one knows if they know (but we assume they don't) that today we all are 11 billion miles away from the place we were in the universe one year ago on this day, due to the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Sun orbiting the center of the galaxy and all of it moving at staggering speeds (0.2% of the speed of light). But they showed me a village buried under a landslide that was abandoned by all its inhabitants a month before the landslide "suddenly" and "unpredictably" happened. What did they know?.. Our science is blind to this kind of knowledge. It capitalizes on our knowledge of a "need to know" -- we do need to know. But then the subject matter of our quest to know is expertly thwarted and redirected into the need to know how to make Monsanto wealthier and the like. We keep knowing things that don't make a dent in how happy our children are, how loving our relationships, how meaningful our day of labor, how to get to that peace of mind the need for which is at the root of our "need to know." And deep in our heart we know that we don't know, we're just being defensive when we proclaim we do and present this or that formula as proof. E equals mc square, Einstein said. But he beat his wife on a regular basis and was arrested for it twice. What did he know, what did he not know?.. Finding out that e equals mc square didn't make him happier, didn't make his wife happier. What's the point of knowing it then?.. If your depressed mother is staring at the wall or at the TV screen and sees nothing but bleak despair in either place and has been at it for years, if your Selective Serotonin Receptors Inhibitor-inhibited father looks at you with extinguished eyes of a frozen fish, your wife thinks you're a monster, a bore, a failure or, in the best case scenario, a cash machine, your husband hates you for everything you are or will ever be and lets you know he does with every modulation of his voice, your friend stabs you in the back as soon as you both find yourselves competing for the same promotion, your children are trying not to show how much they summarily despise you ("like, whatever...") -- what do you know?.. What is it that our science has fixed for you once you knew?.. In the best case scenario, it made a better cash machine out of you. Respect. I mean the generic "you," of course.

But what if they lose? A boot crushes human face for eternity.* (*a George Orwell quote)

I think of this "distinction" as "tampering" or "intervention." Yes, it is artificial, it's a method whereby "us" are thwarted and transformed into "them." "Them" whom the gnostics called "archons," semisynthetic beings of technology, created by Gaia by mistake. Power hungry, full of deception, capable of inducing all-encompassing mass hallucinations shrouding a whole world in unreality, makers of hell on earth covered up by fake visions of paradise (like in The Matrix). The reason people, humans, fall for it is that these beings have the power equal to that of life -- the power of death. Death is sexy. You surround yourself with things dead, they are easy to manipulate, they are not as messy as things alive, they are controllable, predictable, obedient. That's our technology, and sciences at the service of producing that and only that. Archonic to gnostics, demonic to taoists. The one and only, the undeniable, the best ever to the turncoat former or would-be humans, the enslaved, the exploited, and the deadened.

Well... yes, from the perspective of the realm of ghosts and demons, the world of organic life is not the real world. Which begs the question -- where the hell are we?.. And who the hell are we?.. Humans are not insatiable. It was humans who lived alongside 60 million buffalo until 1810. Humans hunted them for hundreds of thousands of years without endangering the buffalo's (or their own) existence, or feeling compelled to take more (or less) than "enough." Humans knew -- and lived -- the meaning of "enough." No, it's not humans who are insatiable. If it's insatiable, it's a gui, a hungry ghost.

Yeah, why not indeed?... Take a look at one of the why-nots I recently posted in my PPF: http://thedaobums.com/topic/37078-2014-a-war-odyssey/?p=615007 "This is a mountain of buffalo skulls, the picture taken circa 1870. These buffalo were killed by the American army in order to force Indians off the land. In 1800 there were 60 million American Buffalo. In 1890, 750 were left." And another problem is, "values" divorced from immersion lifestyle and imprinting learning don't work. They are not realistic because reality has been removed from under them and its roots cut off. That's why all those hippie communes failed. If you grow up in front of the screen, you are not part of reality. You are trained, conditioned, and good to go for observing unreality and living it. You are product and part of unreality, and are not equipped by your whole psycho-physical conditioning to organically fit in a real world. Much less to create it -- from scratch, and against all-around resistance of its overlords. What taoists call "demonic sciences" appears to be anisomorphic.

I always do compact taiji and assorted stretches in the isle. I noticed I'm the only one doing this. I don't give a flying fuck, pun deliberate. Theoretically it could annoy someone, but in my experience, the opposite is true -- the only comments I get are along the lines of, "what a great idea! I should have thought of it too." But then they don't proceed to do it. The whole set-up is so imprisoning, people are afraid to do anything unsanctioned with their bodies even if it is not explicitly forbidden. And thank god it isn't. I am sure they would forbid it if more people wanted to do it. So I'm not advertizing. Please don't follow my example. You don't want to look like a weirdo doing something other than what everybody is doing, right? So, please don't.

Or the nuclear weapons we're using today and amassing and perfecting so as to use tomorrow. I'm very prone to holding unpopular views, I know. One of them is that a science that giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other in its technological incarnations has missed out on something crucial. The ancients tried to not lose awareness of this danger -- e.g. in medicine -- "above all, do no harm" was offered in an attempt to prevent this very kind of developments, for giving with one hand and taking away with the other only maintains the sum total of unhealth and unwholeness, and any science in the service of unhealth and unwholeness should be a bit humbler about its accomplishments methinks. So I'm not a fan of wonderful technological advances promoted as the sweet fruit of our science while omitting any mention of the bitter ones. Science that gave us computers had to take communities away first so that computers would become necessary -- and then put these computers in charge of systems of mass destruction encapsulating the whole world in a web of constant, and realistic, subliminal fear of its imminent destruction -- this is what the collective unconscious has been based on ever since Hiroshima. What this kind of backdrop unconscious expectations have done to the human consciousness is anyone's guess. I've heard a very funky version of our quantum accomplishments. There's this idea that if you destroy life in a nuclear blast, you manage to destroy the souls, not just the bodies. That it's a way to make death of the soul possible, not achievable by other methods of killing or dying. But our science won't "go there" because it posits we have no soul to begin with.

As a taoist, I would go farther and say that science ends when 64 technological inventions have been made. Science ends, profiteering begins. Why 64? The Ta Chuan says so. It lists all the useful inventions (a gate, a boat, a watch tower, etc.) created by the "holy sages" (scientists of their time) based on observing and contemplating nature. Anything that heaven makes "simple" and earth makes "easy" can be replicated by the human mind and the human hands. The "simple" and "easy" steps remain so up to the 64th. Beyond that, fragmentation becomes unmanageable, and knowledge and inventions split away from what's "simple and easy" and move into the territory of "possible if you exploit someone else, and profitable for a few at the expense of many." This is the death of science and the birth of the corporation. The genetic code is highly similar among all organisms and can be expressed in a simple table with 64 entries. When a science or technology emerges that is not rooted in the capacity of the living body to find one on one matches between its functioning and the antics of this new science or technology, we're dealing with out-of-body sciences, belonging in the realm of ghosts, zombies and demons. Live sciences do not go against the human body, mind, or spirit. If a science, or a technology based on it, does this, it is not the science of the DNA-based life. When taoists accidentally invented gunpowder, they didn't use it for 300 years because they inferred, correctly, that they stumbled upon "the science of the demons." (Only after Europeans laid their hands on this invention and started using it was the Chinese emperor forced to have his military catch up.) A prime example of the right way to do things -- if you discover a technology that is too explosive and fragmenting to the human life, do not use it, it is not of, or for, humans. But our science has overstepped this natural boundary into the zombieland of uncontrollable demonic technologies in such a hurry as though our scientists are being chased by hungry ghosts and/or have turned into same. Strike the "as though" part.

This is Shou (Sau), one of the three Star Gods (Fu, Lu, Shou). He is known as the Old Man of the South Pole, the God of Longevity. The star of the South Pole (Canopus) in Chinese astrology is believed to control the life span of humans. Shou, its ruler (and/or its incarnation), is depicted with a high domed forehead, the staff, and the peach -- the peach is from Xi Wangmu's garden and confers immortality. Sometimes he also carries a gourd with the elixir of life. Congrats on obtaining the statue. In feng shui it is considered auspicious to have in the house, especially if Shou is positioned so as to have unobstructed view of the main entrance.

And WHACK! silenced me -- that's how I learned "what's the sound of one hand clapping."

I second that. I followed this very advice many years ago, and upon getting as fluent in modern physics as an informal education can allow, was rewarded with many impromptu lectures in quantum mechanics, superstrings theory, astrophysics, Minkowski spacetime mathematics and the like -- all the yummy stuff. So with this classical foundation I was equipped to tackle Gilbert Ning LIng's biophysics, fractals and chaos theories, and finally, as a crowning gem, taoist physics of wuji/taiji. I have a T-shirt that says, Schrödinger's cat is alive! -- in black letters arranged just so that the white spaces between them form the word "dead." I have come to believe that the same is true of modern physics.

No Ludwig Wittgenstein on your list?.. No Karl Popper?..

It's from one of the books in my collection on the subject of the I Ching, don't remember which. I'll try to look online, see if I can find it. As for the pill not worth seeking -- that was the era of external alchemy, and the pill was produced by its methods. I am not opposed to these methods, in fact I believe the slant toward "all things spiritual are better than all things material" is not indigenous to taoism at all. Taoists pioneered both external and internal alchemy. It so happened that external was up our Western alley so it got picked up, appropriated, and eventually turned into "better life through chemistry" (shudder). But put to good use, external alchemy is in no way inferior. Unfortunately, taoists did indeed have to experiment on death row convicts on emperors' orders (and poisoned quite a few while at it), emperors were of course the number one customers for the pill, they financed the research and thus unwittingly helped many taoist inventions materialize (gunpowder was created in the course of the search for that pill, ironically enough, and I have my suspicions about ice cream too. ) But there's no way to tell if the pill was ever actually made -- for if it was, I'm pretty sure the inventor would do as Lady Chang-O did, instead of giving it to a professional tyrant by job description. This doesn't mean it's not worth seeking, only that it's even harder to find than the internal one.

Which is the same thing as serving chocolate ice cream and sewing needles in one scoop and ignoring all objections. Tailors do make good use of sewing needles. Kids love chocolate ice cream. So why not mix them together and call this product Tailor's Ice Cream... er... Modern Physics. That, after all, IS the scientific method some of our contemporaries are so proud of that has been applied to the field so far.

I spent a good more-than-half of my life among physicists, mathematicians, and in houses where I had a hard time squeezing my herbal encyclopedias into any shelf space not occupied by books on quantum mechanics (which is incidentally the correct term -- there's no such thing as "quantum physics.") I can attest to the fact that people who don't have the foggiest about the subject matter of this science or its methods have much more reverence for its purported infallibility than people who actually do it.

Sure. I use bells for two purposes -- to open and close a taoist ceremony, and for clearing the space. Sometimes regularly, and sometimes "as needed," I ring out the whole place, getting into all the nooks and crannies. This breaks up any unwanted accumulations of stray energies and occasional uninvited entities. Mostly it's prophylactic, but sometimes it's also treatment. I use a drum (mine are a Tarahumara, an African, and a hapi drum which is more a musical instrument than a drum) as "the horse," a shamanic (and also taoist, for some practices) device to transport one's consciousness to a different place. It's basically the same tool as meditation but more "focused" -- in wuwei meditation you flood your consciousness with "nothing to do" and push it out (or in) into the uncharted territory where it is "normally" too preoccupied (or too set in its ways, or too fearful) to tread; while monotonous rhythmic drumming floods it out of its comfort zone by whacking every "ordinary" thought on the head before it has a chance to drag you along its "ordinary" venues. Hapi is for inspiration. Rattles are used with icaros (forgot to mention that I have icaros for vocalizations, a Peruvian legacy), on very rare occasions. The instructions for the occasion come from non-ordinary places, and this is far from a "favorite" far as my practices go -- more like a spiritual obligation of sorts. They are used on someone else's behalf, on request only (and not always -- the request must come from both places simultaneously, ordinary and non-ordinary. Hard to explain...) Rain sticks are used as either one of the previous three mentioned, and also for the opening and closing of my seasonal (winter) meditation which actually also involves a mantra (another vocalization). Erhu is used to annoy the neighbors. Just kidding. It is the sound counterpart of calligraphy practice, a "qi finder" when I look for just the right "tone."

I use bells, drums, rattles, rain sticks, and erhu.

One and two and three poets seek inside their heads. The ant lifts a drop. The ant lifts a drop of water with two front legs, technically arms. Technically arms, they don't disturb surface ties. The drop is a ball. The drop is a ball, a tiny, shiny, rainy mini-miracle. Mini-miracle is being observed closely by Richard Feynman. By Richard Feynman, "Surely you must be joking." The ant was from there. The ant was from there, one of many miracles noticed by the sage. Noticed by the sage who does not seek in his head but looks at the world. But looks at the world unlike some poets I know, one and two and three.

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Wow! Thank you! The ice is breaking, the tide is turning... 1. Should the OP approve every post before it is shown? Otherwise it stays hidden. Not sure. Worth thinking about. Off the top of my head, "yes," but if the OP is simply busy elsewhere and the delay frustrates the contributor, this could create unnecessary tensions. Let's brainstorm. 2. Should the OP hide posts at will? Doesn't seem worth it since you're saying it's impossible to hide from others with the same access level to the section anyway? So, if it's impossible, then no. But if it's possible, then yes. 3. Should the OP delete posts at will? Yes. A clean-up would happen where a derail or an unwelcome challenge or any number of contentious "contaminations" would "normally" take place. If it doesn't belong, it is gone. Perhaps the OP will courteously inform the contributor that the contribution was considered and found incompatible with the intent of the OP. 4. Should the OP move posts at will? No. Don't like this practice anywhere anyway. Posts that don't belong should not be posted. Whoever made the mistake of posting something of interest to them that ignores what's of interest to the OP should shoulder the consequences. I wouldn't want the OP to work too hard. Clean, unclutter. Good housekeeping. Good feng shui. Anyone who tries to avoid a mess in his or her environment knows that it is not accomplished by transporting the mess from one corner to another or sweeping it under the rug. You clean and discard your unwanted stuff, not pile it up elsewhere.

Daeliun, thinking in abstract categories is not my strong suit. I am a pragmatist. I'm not a techno savvy pragmatist at that -- I can't invent a software wheel, I can only ask if the already invented wheel can be applied to the already invented suitcase so as to come up with a suitcase on wheels. I'm looking to apply the already existing format to an area where it hasn't been applied yet. To wit, the format of a blog to one section of a forum. A blog is created by an "anarch" who is the sole ruler of his or her blog (within the structure of whatever general restrictions are pre-imposed by whatever entity makes the very existence of blogs in his/her/its domain possible). I envision a section of the forum where every thread started by anyone would be ruled like a blog. The anarch of a blog does not ask any authority's permission to "approve" or "disapprove" any and all contributions made by those who did NOT create this blog. He or she rules it as he or she pleases. That's the technical structure which I'm hoping is possible but don't know if it is, not my area of competence. The ethical structure, which I do feel competent enough to tackle, would be "pre-installed" as "no contention, come with acceptance, support, benevolence, empathy -- the prerequisites for participation -- or else don't use this section." That's all, folks. "Anarchy" the dictionary definition does not matter. I could use "monarchy." Or "meritocracy." Or "horizontal management," or "sovereign contributions," or anything else. A suitcase on wheels may bear a label -- "Samsung" or "American Tourister" or "Anarchy." But it's not the label that lets it roll. I was looking for what can make it roll -- what you might call it is unimportant. Obviously the word "anarch" was used metaphorically, I'm not writing a dissertation on anarchy, I'm proposing an alpha test of a blog format for a forum section. The idea was born of a measure of frustration with the overall current vector of forum interactions and a desire for a better one, as a test of theoretical and empirical feasibility of this "better." That kind of a deal.

"yex" is very freudian indeed. Although in the best case scenario it means "yes to sex," you may also want to consider the ancient meaning of the X symbol -- "metal piercing earth," the black-magical method used for "to kill what it is applied to." ( I have always had trouble with Rx, Exxon, Celebrex and the rest of it because of that. These guys know their black magic well.) Decisively object to this being compared to Deci's stance. Deci wanted this for himself only and exclusively, as the privilege of the chosen one, or should I say the self-chosen one. I want it for everybody. Big difference. I honestly think people would mostly be decent given an opportunity to use this. Maybe I'm overly optimistic. But look at the Haiku thread someone (sorry, don't remember who) cited as an example of a thread where no one attacks anyone. Apt example. There's only ONE rule in this thread, but a rule inviolable: the format. Use the last line of the previous entry, and follow the 5-7-5 haiku format. Nothing else! And over four hundred pages later, it is still alive and going strong. And of course from time to time someone deviates -- fails to pay attention to the One Rule of the thread and does not link the chain, or does not count the syllables. He or she is promptly corrected, the chain is repaired by someone, and the corrected party holds no grudges. So it is possible after all to follow ONE ironclad rule. It provides structure. Native Americans referred to all structured entities as "walking-in-skins," be it a tree, a human, a river, or a tribe with its rules. One rule is enough to provide the "skin" to walk in. The river only needs its banks to be the river. But it does need its banks to be the river. If the banks were, "no contention, only support in this section -- and if you don't support what's being offered, go elsewhere," I do believe many -- most -- would refrain from demolishing these banks. People instinctively crave a sensible structure to their endeavors -- that's what senseless control-freakish ones capitalize on and co-opt so easily. A sensible one is actually what grants and expands freedom without abusing it, instead of taking it away to prevent its abuse. Anyone who knows taiji knows that...

Fun pseudo physics: Schrödinger's cat alive, dead, both and neither. Meow.