Taomeow

A teacher of writers has written a book about the right way to write a novel. He tells those who write that superfluous phrases do nothing but take up space. These phrases: of course/for example/for instance/ at this (or that) point in time/ seemed to/in this case/ little did (someone) know/ without a doubt/pretty much/some kind of/ unbeknownst to (whomever)/ I can honestly say/ disappear or vanish from sight or view/ happens to be/such as it was (or is)/ be that as it may/as a matter of fact/ -- are nothing but wind and chatter. I pity the typing monkeys forbidden to chatter. I pity the wind that's stopped from flapping the tongue of the sail in rhythmic pursuits of its story. I pity the students, I pity the teacher, I'm actually, none the less, incidentally, killing my hero today, pretty much. He whispers, "oh no..." As a matter of fact, I'm writing a merciless novel. A learned parrot whose wings have been clipped will stumble on every page, will cough disapproval through beakfuls of dust from towers of Babel exploding at this (or that) point in time.

"When General Relativity was first quantized (becoming a theory of quantum gravity) in the 1960’s by John Wheeler, the result predicted a static state of the Universe, that is – no change, i.e. timelessness. This particular solution to the quantization of General Relativity is known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. The result seemed to be paradoxical – because how can the Universe be static and unchanging – when our every experience is of change. Like the seeming axiom, ‘the only thing that stays the same is change’." http://resonance.is/change-for-a-paradigm-new-experiment-shows-how-time-may-emerge-from-quantum-entanglement/ Sounds remarkably like the taoist paradoxical paradigm of tao-in-stillness (Wuji, Xian Tian) being/becoming tao-in-motion (Taiji, Hou Tian) -- something the human mind tries to interpret as sequential while the mind of tao (shared by the holy sages) perceives as both cyclical and simultaneous, counterintuitively enough. This is something a human mind does indeed find hard to fathom, but systemically, to the whole human being, the handle on this is available for grasping. The state in which this is grasped is not a "state of mind" -- it is something else... just like tao is not a state of mind, it's something else. One can describe various aspects of "how" this is possible but not really define it. (Tipping a hat to Mr. Laozi. ) But a lack of definition does not equal a lack of existence... fortunately for us all. Oh, and a big bang happens in the trigram of Spring, the third one, every time the unchanging tao feels like changing. Taoist classics refer to this eternally recurring beginning as "a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning." This is where, when, and how Water produces Fire -- spontaneously. Water is uncreated. Fire is uncreated. Fire gets bored, decides to get created. Big bang. Only in Spring, mind you. The cosmic spring of the taoist cosmic process of cosmic seasons. A seasonal event, big bang is. Nothing more.

A year ago this was one of the best airports in Europe

edit: in-the-moment posting, the moment has passed

There was no big bang though. That's old physics of unresolved internal conflicts. I'm reading up on the new ideas -- the best ones propose cyclical universe(s) with no beginning, uncreated and indestructible. No expansion either except the kind followed by contraction followed by expansion, etc.. Very taoist.

So here's another thing. The most electrically active organs (i.e. the most Fire) are the heart and the brain. The most Water organs are the womb and the Kidneys which include the reproductive system. The taoist cosmology correlates our physiology to the structure of reality -- heaven/light above, earth/water below, human sandwiched in the middle between them. (In terms of wuxing "human" is related to Wood, biological live entities, and between Fire and Water there's Metal. So "golden light" of taoism is not light -- except in buddhism-influenced renditions. It is gold, it's Metal in its fluid state that generates the phase that nourishes life -- Water. The role of Fire is to make it fluid (imbuing it with Water properties) in the Control cycle. Original taoism works with these energies of the world every which way based on their true universal dynamics. Fire, Light, etc. centered modalities don't. Which is why they fail to accurately reflect what's going on in the middle world, by offering either that it's not real (maya) or that it's all suffering, karma, punishment, something to escape... that birth is a "fall," that rebirth is a "sentence," that biological life is an aberration, that one must look forward to escaping it and joining some luminous eternal something or other. To me, all of it is a construct of Fire, of the Higher... er... upper, neocortical, electrochemically charged and continuously firing synapses in the brain. In any spiritual wrapper it is a head game, a mind trip. A betrayal one might say -- of the body, of the womb, of life on earth. The goal of taoism is to master all of these energies -- as tao does. "Gathering the light" in quanzhen is legit -- but one would have to know why and what for before assessing the significance of the practice. In my school, we gather it back into the body because it has been scattered, in pursuits of the mind. We've squandered our light -- we just want it back, whatever is rightfully ours. No more. No less. If the goal of a taoist alchemical practice is an immortalist one (as it usually is in the original taoism), you go backward, from Fire to Water, from having used your head to get whatever you were after (e.g. more light, eternal light, unified light, whatever you call it) to having been nourished spontaneously in the waters of the womb of the Great Mother. But don't let me digress too far into alchemical paraphernalia. What I'm trying to say is, taoism does not deny, negate, belittle Fire/Light in any shape or form -- it just lets it know its true place in the grand scheme of things. A dynamic place, not some be-all end-all "goal."

OK. So here's one more reason it's taoism over buddhism for me: taoism is not one of the sun-worship-derived religions. Torches, white light, golden light, illumination, enlightenment, blaze of glory, lightning-throwing gods, burning bushes, and on and on... all of it is sun worship under different trademarks printed on different wrappers. Unfold the wrapper and you won't be able to tell buddhism from christianity from Ra veneration from Mitra cult. Too many burnings, immolations, incinerations... too many burned libraries for my taste. Many of them made of books, and many more, of trees... billions of trees, and trillions of dark, inconspicuous creatures that used to call them home before that glorious light torched them out of existence. Obviously out of compassion. Obviously for their own good. Me no like. Me like what puts those fires out. Taoism does -- with water.

Yes -- although if this is in reference to my library metaphor, an arc torch at a library, so as to help the illiterate, is pretty scary as metaphors go... but also pretty accurate, as our history goes. Compassion without comprehension is like mustard without beef... It can make one cry, sure thing... but...

And this is a mirror image of what happened to me. Except "beliefs" didn't even play into that. I discovered energies of the world -- empirically, not theoretically -- and was struggling to explain and name them. I still have a notebook from those times with diagrams, attempts at formulas, brief descriptions (opening-closing, inward bound-outward bound, the curved Nothing (zero) flattens into the straight One and One splits in Two and Two curves into Three, etc. -- that last bit, without ever having read Laozi, mind you), so discovering taoism was like regaining memory after having suffered from some existential amnesia. To this day, I maintain it is the supreme ultimate science. Philosophy and religion of taoism are both Taoist Science 101 to me. Do I "believe?" Don't have to. No one has to believe that they are or aren't having a cup of coffee. I just happen to be so organized that I don't have to believe in yin-yang, qi, wuxing, bagua, ganying either. That sometimes they appear as philosophical ideas and sometimes as deities is a side effect. Taoism is the supreme ultimate science of the energies of the world. To be in this world and maintain ignorance of how it works is like having been imprisoned at an infinite library, with nothing whatsoever to do except read, and never having bothered to learn to read. Most non-taoist modalities are this kind of illiteracy to me... their subscribers are in the same library, but they use books as bricks to build pyramids out of to entertain themselves somehow -- instead of learning to read them. Or they are busy discarding them, shredding them, throwing them in a furnace in search of the One True Book. Which they wouldn't know how to read even if it existed. Or they take a random book with a particularly fancy cover and designate it that. That is The. The is It. And then whack someone who has designated a different book on the head with This One, the The. And on and on...

A new addition: The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, by Julian Barbour

Shaped like a bagua, the world of Eight Directions torsions itself.

The only difference between a rant and an essay is punctuation. -- my son, in a smartphone text

Things on earth are dense. Things in the sky are sparse. A bird, a plane, a Superman, a cloud, a chemtrail, a UFO, the sun and moon and stars, and that's about it. Today I spoke to the hawk. I asked him, "hunting or bringing omens?" He circled above with a cry of triumph: "I'm hunting! I'm bringing omens!"

Not time for claws yet! Haomao, wait! Shoo! First let me change from silk to jeans!

Begin with a smile, speak softly, carry a big stick, you will go far. (Verbatim from a letter written by President Theodore Roosevelt to Henry L. Sprague, on January 26th, 1900.)

(adding a missing fifth syllable) Damn... works every time: show them grass that is greener, they will paint their lawn.

Our brains didn't get any bigger since we were hunters-gatherers. However, we used to use them to capacity -- precisely because there was no allocation of work, in fact no work, only life. I read "The Indian How" that describes the lifestyle of Native American tribes before the white man came. Nobody was a specialist. Everybody hunted in season, gathered in season, fished in season, mended the equipment in season, tanned leather in season, made moccasins and clothes, pitched dwellings, took turns telling stories, danced, played sports, taught children... should I go on? The author (who got a double education, tribal first and then the white man's) describes everything everybody did (including him) -- there were no specialists, and everybody was a specialist. And there was no boredom, no burnout, no "hate my job" feelings -- if you hated hunting (very unlikely), you had to wait a bit and you'd be sewing instead... And vice versa. Technologically, our ancestors matched their environment way better than we do. With all our "scientific advances," in the whole of our civilized history we were unable to add even one edible from any area to the menu of the people inhabiting it based on any "scientific knowledge" -- they knew them all and were not pining for it for lack of technology to get it -- they got it. They didn't suffer from exposure in any climates that kill a modern person when he or she is left one on one with nature sometimes within hours. They didn't lack technology to stay warm when it's cold or cool when it's hot -- they had it, and it was neither better nor worse than some nonexistent "standard" we may envision today -- it was a one on one match, whatever the task was, the technology to accomplish it was there. No literacy? But their shortest memory was longer than our longest pencil. Oral transmissions did the job for hundreds of thousands of years. People learned history nonstop, every day -- they still did in Africa as recently as before colonial times, a 6-year-old recited his or her family history seventy generations back. Do you know yours? So, bigger brains we don't have, that's a scientific fact, but we use ours differently now, that's also a scientific fact. To wit, they used their brains to full capacity, and we use 70% of our brains to repress and hold down the remaining 30%. Cognitive neuroscientists know it's not normal -- the same happens to animals only when they are abused from an early age. They become tame, but the price to pay for being tame is being dumb... And these animals, raised in captivity, don't survive in the wild if they are let out later. Neither could we. We are not just not strong enough. We are not smart enough.

There used to be an interactive exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology in LA, an optical device that replicated the eyesight of a bee for a human looking through it. I looked. I can tell you with certainty that we are not physically equipped to have a hive mentality. Unfortunately, we are fully equipped to have a herd mentality. Happy Year of the Sheep everyone! (coming to the theaters near you February 19th).

Pair by pair, little swallows on the bookshelves hop. Dot by dot, little petals on the ink-slab drop. Reading the Book of Changes I sit near a window, Forgetful how much longer spring will with us stop. Yeh Li, "A Scene in Late Spring"

First we look at the hills in the painting, Then we look at the painting in the hills. Li Liweng

Oh, that's just a case of collective anosognosia. The world has already ended, but due to the damage sustained, humanity can't assimilate the knowledge. "Prophecies" are actually memories, defensively misplaced into the future -- much like an anosognosia sufferer may say something like, "I hope I never get a stroke, even though my doctor keeps warning me about my high blood pressure." This is said after the stroke has taken place and destroyed the very areas of the brain that could provide evidence of it having happened. A more superficial condition, known as denial, usually can't be remedied with information about the real state of affairs either, but anosognosiacs take this ability to ignore reality to its defensive limits -- e.g. they can deny the absence of legs which have been amputated. If the doctor tries to bring evidence to their attention, they say something like, "well, it's pretty common for some people to be afraid of losing their legs, but their fears have no basis in reality."

After a few rotations on the side table: The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield Letters to Vera, by Vladimir Nabokov T'ai Chi according to the I Ching, by Stuart Alve Olson The Chen-style Taijiquan for Life Enhancement, by Chen Zhenglei

My favorite lepidopterist

It was medieval China in my time. And we nearly banned Sean.

Thank you. So, it's like "fall in love" and "fallen love" in English?