Taomeow

I sealed that genie to ripen in the bottle many moons ago... now it's out and going mainstream, looks like. http://thetaobums.com/topic/13308-what-do-the-bums-think-about-this-guys-taoist-principles/?p=171242 "Taomeow Posted 17 January 2010 - 04:56 PM (...) It was read as a political pamphlet by many of its contemporaries, not as a work of philosophy at all. A proposed alternative choice of social behavior, revolutionary in its attempts to talk to the ruler rather than to the ruled. Laozi talks to the emperor, king, sovereign, father, man of power and authority, not to the powerless -- have you noticed?.. To understand what "not human" means to Laozi, one needs to consider what "human" means to him. A pat on the shoulder, an encouragement to do things the way we already do them? Hardly..."

I suspect it was a process that entails stages -- all linear mechanistic "renovations" do, of necessity -- step 1, step 2, step 3, step 10,000 -- and we may well be in the final stages, accelerating toward its goal. The names for this ultimate goal changed throughout history, but the essence, the heart of the matter, has always been the same. The modern name for this goal is "transhumanism." What it actually means is, all things human have to be eliminated in stages -- step 1, step 2, etc, -- because it can't be done all at once. If you want to unclutter what you think is in the way of the sterile order you envision -- to wit, mother nature -- you have to go step by step. Deforestation first, monocultures next, man-made niches inhabitable only by whatever species you allow to inhabit them (sedentary agricultural settlements and then cities) next, biodiversity on a wider, planetary scale eliminated next, human diversity eliminated progressively with each step, toward just one type of human -- and on and on. I don't believe it could happen spontaneously via human error, we didn't err like that before, and if we did, we promptly self-corrected. It's something else... I forgot to mention one more, not last and most definitely not least, blessing we were given with agriculture and urbanization: war. Now THAT's something our prehistoric ancestors weren't advanced enough to think up, that's for sure. The most violent tribe ever discovered in modernity is the Yanomame of the Amazon, they lived and breathed war till very recently -- and here's how they waged it. Two warring villages come together. Together, they build a corral of sorts, and let one man from each side enter it, each with a big stick, and start beating each other. Once the weaker warrior falls, a new pair is cheered onto the scene, and they beat each other. And so on. Once a number of boxers... er, hockey players... er, football players... no, MMA fighters, that's it! -- had thus waged the tribal war, the side that has fewer fallen warriors celebrates victory by getting drunk and rowdy, and everybody goes home. One-on-one combat was how we expressed our violence till we became civilized. Of course there weren't any countries to engage, in fact you can't have a country unless you invent war first...

The life expectancy myth is made up in its entirety. The goal of the falsification is twofold -- to teach us not to complain, and to convince us that we have nothing to complain about. There's not so many hunter-gatherer of prehistory bones that have ever been available for investigation to begin with, no more than a few scientists ever actually saw them, and fewer had a chance to work with them, and fewer, to work with them thoroughly, and fewer to none -- to come to any conclusions that would deviate from the party line. So they gingerly positioned this party line on just one fact -- only one -- nothing else -- and then they interpreted this fact to mean what they were supposed to coerce it into meaning (something the fact by itself never meant to mean.) That single fact is that these bones are dense and not diseased. The whole tall tale about this fact meaning that their owners died off like flies before getting arthritis is wobbling through its glorious scientific existence standing on this premise. Sometimes I simply marvel at the idiocy of our "scientific thought" wherever life sciences are concerned -- it's as though being brain damaged is a prerequisite to getting a Ph.D. in those. But the propaganda machine couldn't possibly work any other way. could it? Who of the overlords or their scientific hirelings would announce to the public that courtesy of their activities we live shorter and far more miserable lives than hunters-gatherers did?.. Better present everybody with brain-damaged logic instead, and let's damage every brain so it can accommodate it. No scientific paper making a peep about bones having been dense not because their prehistoric owners died young but because (e.g.) they didn't consume gluten-containing grains that destroy the bones until agricultural practices were introduced has ever made it through the "peer review," but the thing is, BOTH facts have made their leap through both respective hoops -- it's just that no scientist is allowed to put two and two together, to use fact B as a better explanation for fact A than the current lopsided one. It is a fact that consuming grains causes bone deterioration -- the very first signs of "aging bones" appear together with agricultural practices. It is, moreover, a well understood fact just how exactly gluten destroys bones -- immunologically it's pretty fancy, it's an autoimmune process that triggers a self-destruct program because the body constantly attacks the foreign and hostile protein (gluten molecules closely resemble the structure of some ancient viruses) at the site of its attachment -- which, interestingly enough, happens to be the bones (not that it stays put there, it does damage everywhere else but the bones are the primary site of its sedimentation, and that's what the immune system gets to work attacking, with chronic inflammations that make our bones look "aged" and eventually brittle and lace-like structure-impaired if this is going on long enough.) No one who doesn't eat that would have such bones. Hunter-gatherers didn't eat that. So instead of concluding that their bones, barring exposure to what damages ours, appeared young because they were undamaged in old age, we pronounce that they simply failed to reach old age. And then spin a tall tale with not a shred of proof explaining how they were clumsy and careless and overall inept at survival and so dropped like flies at 30-40 years of age. Brilliant. In reality, even today, in people who've practiced taiji for decades, bone density (which the practice slowly but continuously increases) at 90 is indistinguishable from that in a healthy 19-year-old. I wonder what scientists will say about those bones ten thousand years from now if they stick to the same logic ours use today. In all likelihood, they will say that the average life span of a taji practitioner in the 21st century was 19.

Gotta get ready for the new year's party, so, no homework for today, please. Remind me later -- although "peer reviewed" equals "ministry approved," so you might have to do with references to a few books instead. Sorry.

Wasn't meant as a put down. And of course it's based on fact, the only kind of fact available to me when assessing the state of Ralis -- his posts. They tend to be pretty unfriendly toward any and all deviation from the ministry-sanctioned mentality. In particular, you have repeatedly (very repeatedly) treated me as an ignorant flake on the basis of my expressing non-ministry-approved views, opinions and beliefs, whereas I assure you this is not the case. I'm neither ignorant nor flaky and take my cognitive process seriously. It's just that I try to be mindful of its health by stopping the ministry's attempts to hijack it and replace it with their own template. It has been my impression that you never found these conscious precautions necessary, which is why you often speak as though you are speaking their mind. This state I view as unfortunate -- but I may be wrong, you may be far more fortunate than me, in which case the word "victim" should be replaced by the word "beneficiary." Would that work?

Parasites -- no, not a generalization at all, I wouldn't drink from the river at 13 if adults who live on that river didn't tell me it's safe, having done it all their lives. (Don't try this at home, kids, self-cleaning bodies of water are all but extinct by now. In this country, only Lake Tahoe was left some fifteen years ago, don't know about now. They are disappearing of course, and what we perceive as "it was never safe" as the outcome of what we're dealing with now -- now THAT's an extrapolation.) Smallpox -- precisely at the time of introduction of agriculture. I didn't say disaster struck in the form of urbanization and forgot all about agriculture. Agriculture always comes first, urbanization, next. Whether epidemic disease appears spontaneously as the outcome of agricultural lifestyles having altered the environment and the host (weakening both), or is introduced by the same entities, whoever they are, who forced agriculture on the species that was doing mighty fine without it, is anybody's guess. But the sequence is ironclad. Ministry of truth -- no, I don't think you represent it, I think you are one of the victims.

Ack. You missed out on the whole terraforming chunk of history, and your logic is that of someone who has hurled against the wall a precious Ming vase, shattered it to pieces, picked out a few pieces, slapped together a cup out of them and then tells you, ah, those old containers are no good, try drinking from this cup, it's leaking, and it's ugly, and surely a styrofoam one does a better job! Yes, surely. If you ignore the preceding sequence of events that led to it. Africa... How much do you know about how natural its present environment is? Did you know that the Sahara desert is man made, the outcome of agricultural activities of our forefathers? Guess not... Two million years of lack of proper sanitation etc. and we're still here... wow, a miracle of god. What poor sanitation? Did you ever spend even a day in an at least relatively intact forest? I drank from rivers and lakes, I've never had any parasites I can assure you. Communicable diseases -- according to paleoathropologists, these came about only with urban living, we didn't have that blessing prior to that. Infections -- gee whiz, a compromised immune system is certainly better equipped to deal with these than an intact one. Fluctuating food supply -- ever heard of the devastating famines throughout our agricultural history? Wild animals? -- fewer deaths involving those in any one year in all of our history than due to car accidents in the US alone in just one day (3,000 per diem.) And so on... One thing I will say for the overlords. They don't rest on their laurels. The Ministry of Truth is always working overtime.

No worries, I don't take the opposite-of-mine view of these matters personally, I know full well I'm not expressing a widely popular stance here. Which is why I don't often express it. Just got excited to find myself not completely alone with it, for a change of pace. And, no, I don't think we are trapped by comfort and lethargy, I think we are trapped by our social conditions that shape our inability to live differently -- that's what brings about the quest for comfort to people who have a very dim idea, for lack of exposure, as to what comfort really is, and lethargy is our daily bread of chemical and electric and cognitive pollution. We didn't choose it, most of us have no idea there's anything else to choose, or ever was -- and they're right, for most, there's never been a choice, or even the vaguest idea of what an alternative would be like. As for me, I did get exposure to lifestyles I can evaluate and compare -- urban, suburban, countryside, farming, and hunting-gathering (with 85% reliance on the forest and the river) and so have a personal frame of reference. My father took me on my first month-long kayaking trip in the wilderness when I just turned 13. Later I took my own kids on their first such trip when they were 5 (they're twins). Every time with a group of like-minded people, not alone, of course. I have all the skills for a European forest -- which I found not applicable to an American one, incidentally, much less to the Amazonian rain forest. And I can assure you that I am not uninformed regarding the history of the process -- death penalty for trapping the lord's hare in the lord's forest, and for the shooting of the lord's deer, death penalty for the whole family... stuff like that, always like that. That's how you make folks grow turnips, not via convincing them of the wonderful advantages of 14-hour days of backbreaking labor. I did farm work with monocultures for stretches of one month at a time, and I can assure you it's mind numbing and hard and has no inherent spiritual value. I did foraging too -- dozens of varieties of wild mushrooms, berries, nuts, wild edibles of many kinds -- and fishing, and curing and smoking meats and making preserves, and making clothes and shoes by hand, all kinds of stuff. I can tell you that the first system to respond to the latter lifestyle is something cellular that opens up vast resources of energy and health you never knew you had, and it feels good, good to the bone. It's just a buzz of pleasure in your system, not a mind-clouding high but a mind-clearing, senses-sharpening down-to-earth pleasure. You wake up in the morning, and you don't yet know you're awake but you already know you're healthy, happy and strong, and the day will bring more of the same. Nothing like that is brought about by doing farm work, whether by hand or with machinery. And chemicals used these days on farmed crops just snuff out everything down to the bone, numb out any and all natural senses and perceptions one might still have reserves for feeling and using given a chance -- or not anymore, anyone's guess.

Been there done that. I'm a taoist and we worship timeliness. Untimely actions have no merit. Let me try to explain a bit about what it is exactly that I remember -- then maybe you'll see how frustrating this advice sounds every time I get it, and trust me, I get it every time. I remember a cloud, a field, a constant flow of loving and loved people around, nonstop -- not just parents and grandparents but many relatives, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, friends, visitors -- also animals, plants, insects (for some reason I remember the bees especially, dozens of varieties, and of these, especially the night bees that gathered nectar from those flowers that only open at night -- they had pale translucent eyes, and their honey was also pale, almost white, and we called it moon honey -- I wonder if the term "honeymoon" has anything to do with that memory... the night bees' honey was an aphrodisiac, incidentally, and children weren't allowed to touch it... anyway, I could go on and on about those bees if I don't keep my digressions in check.) This cloud of care and closeness was physical, not abstract. All of it touching with love and care not just the mind but the body, constant physical contact, a hand on the shoulder, a hug, a pat, a caress, heads stroked, cheeks and noses brushed against each other, the whole live unity of the tribe felt and feeling. And eyes talking constantly, smiling, laughing, thinking, teasing, informing -- constant flow of light and touch, warmth and reassurance, and sheer joy of "you are here, I am here too, life is good!" -- total absolute acceptance -- you are here, and we are always, at all times, happy that you are, I am here, and I'm always happy that I am here, and I never want to be anywhere else but with you, all of you. Wilderness? It was all about love, if you know where this kind of wilderness exists today, drop me directions, OK? -- on that smartphone and I swear I'll put it through the blender before going. Hard to explain... I remember what it's like to really be human, and unless one does, there's no point trying. It's not about seeking a way away from people. There was nothing about people to push me away from people. THAT's what wild and free is about. Not what we've been conditioned to believe, raw in tooth and claw and all that outrageous BS that they taught us how to be and then convinced us that that's what we are. Where do I find a wilderness that isn't missing what was there and is free of what wasn't there before we got "civilized?" Why do you think we can't step in the same river twice, as Parmenides noted echoing taoist thought? Not only because the river is a different river. But I am a different I too. To go through the motions isn't where it's at. The heart had been ripped out of that lifestyle -- there's no going back anywhere in a space (inner and outer) that has been shaped and is held fast by the very hand that did the ripping out. Going back in time -- that's a different proposition altogether. This, I'm working on...

"Dear Admin, the user who insulted me and whom you asked to edit has removed the offensive comments from his post. Please advise how I can remove them from my soul." -- someone at another forum

I have come to the same conclusion a long time ago. And I don't believe for a second, after years of research and contemplation (and something else, which I will mention in the end), that it was adaptive. Nope, it was coercive -- historic evidence abounds of this never, ever having been a free choice anywhere on earth. It has always been installed by violent force and with extreme, mind-boggling cruelty. It always came hand in hand with slavery, large scale construction projects of the most ridiculous kind using slave labor on a mass scale, and periodic like clockwork, and frequent at that, catastrophic famines. It never served humanity, not for a second. It has always served someone or something else. The fact that we survived and thrived for (per newest assessments) close to 2 million years without this "blessing," which was only introduced a few thousand years ago (a few seconds in our overall time on earth), can't be disputed unless one is brainwashed to believe that we dragged on a miserable existence throughout our long history and then were finally shown the light a second ago, and have lived better than eve ever since. Which is the overall ideation we're spoon fed from the get-go and aren't supposed to ever question. As for changes that purportedly caused us to adapt to new conditions in this manner -- holds no water if one considers that changes (of climate and our overall environment) in the past 10-15 thousand years were infinitesimal compared to the major, far more dramatic, and far more abrupt changes during the overall period of our life on earth. Suffice it to say that we survived a 400,000 year stretch of the deep ice age without either going extinct or leaving any evidence of anything but stellar health and unmatched cooperation (try hunting mammoth without being attuned to each and every member of your hunting party of hundreds. Or raising children for that matter -- furless and helpless in minus 70 degrees conditions, and totally dependent on our adaptability not just to changing conditions but to the unchanging harshness of these conditions for hundreds of thousands of years apiece. This calls for grandparents and great-grandparents -- fully functional, not decrepit. We couldn't have survived our history if we weren't good and kind and caring toward our young and our old. We are a species that must maintain at least three, preferably four generations of functional members of our communities at any given time -- and this suffices for us to survive and thrive. And when this is damaged, nothing else does.) Of course now that we're told that Monsanto feeds us better, when they find completely perfect skeletons of prehistoric folks, they explain it away by telling us that our ancestors lived very short lives, that these are skeletons of people who died young. Reminds me of the way they used to write in scientific books for doctors that mercury is a natural constituent of the human bones -- because ever since Paracelsus, every cold in every child was treated with mercury, so anatomists never saw human bones without mercury having eaten through them for a few hundred years... My best evidence, however, can't be "proved" to anyone else I don't think, so I'll just mention this FWIW. The thing is, I remember... Don't know how or why. I do have a whole bunch of traits (always did) that are suggestive of certain memory blocking mechanisms not having been flipped on properly. I try not to remember too much though, because it seems utterly uncalled for to be part of here and now against the backdrop of those memories. Paradise lost kind of painful. But I sometimes think researchers who go against the grain embark on this particular route of inquiry because they are tormented by their own memories of paradise lost... and are looking for a way to say the same thing by different, "respectable" means. Curious: does anyone have opposite memories? Of how it sucked to be wild and free, and then came the blessing of slavery?..

Edit: moved to PPF thread "Odds and ends from the main forum"

That teacher is reportedly quirky, unpredictable, impatient, almost cruel, and emotionally about 14. He's spent over 70 years cultivating his taoist skills though -- every day -- e.g. he goes to bed with sunset, gets up at 3 am and sits in meditation for 4 hours, then starts practicing taiji, for 8 hours straight, then reads the classics, writes, teaches, and nourishes his heart's desires by taking frequent trips to Singapore and Hong Kong where he's reportedly worshipped as an immortal. But you of course know better how he should live and when he will be ready.

Excellent points! Of the five shens, I can usually see which ones drive someone's practice, and of course I know about mine. Po, my strongest shen, ignited it; zhi, which is in charge of sustaining it, is the weakest, but because I know it and she knows it, we're cultivating her too; yi helps tie the greater "me" and my mind with the practice, provides meanings and explanations; heart shen or lesser shen sustains the drive with a more steady, though less excitable, glow of loyalty and dedication when po, with its bursts of enthusiasm, runs out of fuel and takes a cat nap, which of course it's prone to; and hun manages my relationships with others -- teachers, students, peers and partners.

I remember a quarrel that took place between an acquaintance of mine and his teacher. The acquaintance was about 60, the teacher, about 80. The student disapproved of something the teacher did -- not to him, in the larger world. The teacher took offense at the criticism. They parted company, lessons stopped. My acquaintance has forty years of taiji experience and is a formidable master in his own right. One would think, no big deal? It was a huge deal. He was living against a background of misery over this chasm between him and the teacher. This was going on for a year or so. Then they graciously slipped into a reunion, and I think both not so much pretended that the chasm never happened but actually forgot all about it -- my acquaintance was surprised when I asked him a couple of years later and said, oh, that, well, that was nothing... but I remember very well that, far from being "nothing," it was the weight on his shoulders and the thought on his mind constantly while it was going on. I tried to imagine then how I would feel if I were shunned by my teacher for criticizing him, and I shuddered. I will never criticize him! Ever! This tells me I'm ready... If a student does not see his or her teacher as beyond reproach, one of them is not ready -- or both.

How about "when the teacher is ready, the student appears?"

*** The snowless winter, not as warm as here, behind your shattered window, underneath a bluer, louder sky, with holes and tears in its worn out fabric -- overhead, the canopy of shards of flying metal much sharper than the palm tree leaves, or wit, beyond all reason, you, my alter ego, are meeting what would come were you to stay. Were you more cautious then. It's strange how caution is fond of flipping birdies in our face. My alter ego, war behind your window was in the stars, and stripes, and up their sleeve. I'm sorry. We are one, and yet divided by time and place and choice -- the fork of fate. I raise my glass to you tonight, my virtual, futilely cautious self, for both of us.

Now we're talking. Thank you, this is perfect. I revoke the boomer and send you this: So now you can use it to make it all materialize. (Please make sure the dress does not de-materialize at midnight, could be embarrassing...)

Thank you, Brian. Very Santa of you. Run that Holy Grail bit by me again though -- are you offering it too, or merely saying you've already got one?..

Thanks for nothing, Nungali. I'm not the one to hold grudges though. No sir. Instead, I'm generously sending this your way:

Manitou, your old postcards, and giving them to people as a token of human kindness, sound awesome. And no, I didn't mean to claim anything -- except I had this thought that if it's that medal, I would want it back. So, your collector friend gets no opposition from me! I've seen a British study asserting, based on its findings, that people who live among antiques -- whether they have them at home or work at a museum or restore them for clients -- live longer and are healthier, especially their cardiovascular health was found to be much better than average. Old qi pacifies the heart?.. I just realized that I do own one piece of WWII memorabilia, and its acquisition (an accidental thrift shop find) caused me to research a chapter of history I knew nothing about. It is a heavy brass ash tray with industrial grade engraving on it, a gift from General Suz Tu Fu to Colonel Szaniawski, with Chinese dragons around Western military insignia. I researched it and discovered the Flying Tigers -- The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942. What a glorious flash of history!

A very generous offer! I am not a collector, in fact I don't have any memorabilia from WWII except for pictures in the family album of a few relatives who were killed at the time. But I am missing a piece I used to have. I'll tell you the story, and if no one beats me with a better one, maybe I'll qualify. My grandmother had a medal from WWII, she was a nurse, and the medal said, "For heroic work," and depicted Mr. Stalin. My grandmother hated him, so I found that medal one day in a box of random junk, buttons, broken costume jewelry, stuff like that. I asked her about it, she said, emphatically, throw it out, I don't want this garbage. I was five, no one explained to me why my grandmother got so angry about that medal, but I immediately realized that for someone else, it could be valuable. There was a neighbors' boy, a few years older, who had tropical fish in a fish tank (my family believed I didn't need one), and the fish were fruitful and became many, so the boy used to offer the offspring either for sale (I had no money) or in exchange for something he might like. So, I showed him the medal. He got tremendously excited and told me to choose not one, but a few little fishes. And we were both very happy with the exchange. After a while, I felt sorry for the fishes in a jar and let them out into a small river nearby. Well, you make mistakes at five. I just wanted them to be free. It's ironic I bought their freedom with an image of Mr. Stalin, and it's probably to be expected that it must have been short lived. So, that's the story of the only piece of WWII memorabilia I ever owned. You decide.

Yes, lineage is everything -- has always been, will always be -- though there's no guarantee it will always be genuine, LOL. We claimed our origin from this guy: So, among other things, we would secretly slip notes into school bags, workbooks, even the teacher's journal, or into people's pockets, or drop them in mailboxes, etc., with riddles, tantalizing pieces of the puzzle, threats or promises, and sign them, Agents of Fantomas. For the most incorrigible we used a short poem that went something like, What I seek, I hereby reveal: I need a corpse, you fit the bill. And drew an image of the blue-masked villain for the signature.

"But man thinks too much." "You think so? Too much for what?" "For his puny RAM."

Around the circle, bagua walkers chase their tails. We call them comets.