Taomeow

In my experience, it's an excellent approach -- perhaps with some linguistic fine-tuning so as to make "the offer you can't refuse" sound very neutral, just the way don Corleone used to do it. Seriously though, master Wang Liping teaches some neidan moves in a similar way. E.g. he might tell you: "Look far into the distance, see if anything might be glowing there." This, with eyes closed, in a dark room. You look -- well, I don't know what happens when you look, but I see something glowing. It's not farfetched, I've seen it many times when NOT trying to do anything, it's something that happens, for whatever reason. But then you are asked to do things with this glow that "normally" wouldn't occur to you to do -- and it starts gaining more and more tangibility. Then... OK, then there's always people who will say, after the session, "I can't see anything glowing." So a couple of techniques will be offered -- some for those who can't see, some for those who have a hard time "handling" what they see. Ultimately, some people who can't see or can't feel stuff are not skeptics at all, contrary to what they believe about themselves. They are just not very perceptive, for whatever reason. They are unable to see or feel what's really there, not imaginary stuff, real -- only subtle. Once they have been shown how, they don't have to make things up, they just have to tune in to what was blocked away from their awareness before.

That's fine, I know you long enough to know that we can talk but we can't change each other's reality... er... mind. I second computer work as a tiring and not very healthy pastime in the grand scheme of things -- but typing as such is a breeze on my diet, a relaxed 60 words per minute (I can go as high as 80 in a hurry) due to no stiffness in the joints being brought about by grains consumption. (Incidentally, the Snake Creeping Down move in taiji is a good indicator of where one's diet is going -- I can do it with utmost ease on Abstaining From Grains, but I can't do it on grains.)

So, if "mind creates reality," why do you think reality created by your mind is more reliable than reality created by mine?... Also -- "taoist theory after all" (per your previous post) is my practice, and in taoism as I know it, the mind co-creates reality. Meaning, reality has quite a bit of autonomy from what you think about it. I remember a story (told by Charlotte Gerson) of a cancer patient who was advised to take niacin without having been informed of the niacin flush. She took it on an empty stomach, experienced the flush, and was convinced on the spot that she was experiencing instant healing directly from god. Unfortunately, even though her mind created this reality, it had no effect on the body. Now point by point -- 1. Negative thinking -- creating the concept and putting it in circulation was a psy-op by the government, executed through its paid agents (you'd be deeply shocked I'm sure if I named some of the names) targeting realistic thinking and seeking to desavouer legitimate "negative" observations of abuses, rightful concerns, and ultimately squash the natural human impulse to do something about it. 2. Stress -- yes, that is very damaging, but quite a bit of it comes from the autonomous rather than your-mind-created reality. Mental strategies to reduce it are always welcome -- not at the expense of throwing the body to the wolves though, the mind sometimes does that in order to avoid stress (this is known as wishful thinking), and that's where it goes wrong. 3. Alcohol in moderation is not a problem for most people and quite beneficial for many (since it helps with stress, also lengthens telomeres and prolongs life when used by individuals who don't have contraindications. Drugs and Western medications I would agree with --provided plants (like coffee, e.g.) are not included in the category of "drugs" (government/corporate games with semantics all over again.) 4. Poor diet -- yes. What's poor diet though? What you described earlier as an excellent diet, all those grains, would kill several people I know, including family members. And what I see as excellent diet you may see as "poor." So, one would have to figure out what a poor diet is before avoiding it, right? I believe I'm doing this all the time, never stopped learning -- nutrition is really a fascination of mine, and it is huge, bigger than any other area of study one could get interested in. 5. Excessive sex and watching pornography -- I would say "low quality sex" (what's excessive?..) -- yes, that is damaging in any doses. I've never watched any pornography in my life, nor intend to -- but I'm assuming it must be damaging, though taoists who described the Three Grain Monsters never saw any pornography and were really talking about grains, not something else. 6. Excessive meat consumption -- once "excessive" is adequately defined, I would agree. My paleo guru does provide such definition. Believe it or not, proteins are transformed by the body into carbohydrates if consumed excessively. I'm not kidding. So, portions of meat in this country, which tend to be excessive, are excessive precisely because people who eat so much meat are addicted to carbs, and are getting their fix both externally from carbs proper and internally from metabolic transformations of excessive protein. On the paleo regimen you don't overeat meat -- your every portion is very moderate, and your meals are in general smaller because in the absence of the carb addiction you don't experience false hunger. Carbs make people into gluttons, but on a normal diet we aren't that. 7. Junk food -- agreed, junk is bad. And made of wheat, soy, corn and corn syrup. Hello monsters. 8. I don't even know how to address this. No culture or tribe has ever practiced what you suggest, so I've no frame of reference for where this comes from. A monastery perhaps? But they do everything differently -- e.g. get up and start the day at 3 a.m, go to bed with sunset (currently that would mean 5 pm and counting down.) If you do too, then yes. If not, I don't think so... 9. Agreed. 10. You mean your year, month, day, hour of birth. If you only go by the year, it's i/8th of the picture -- hardly accurate. Yes, bazi compliant eating is superior, but alas, mostly unknown to the population. I do a dietary reading/recommendations whenever I do bazi. OK, ten is enough.

With milk and honey, with sunlight and fog, with blood, with courage, write on.

Never a quitter, he will never acquit her who can't outwit her.

From Tzu-yeh Songs All night I could not sleep Because of the moonlight on my bed. I kept on hearing a voice calling: Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered "yes."

Bound in chains of gold, blindfolded, shell-shocked, wounded, my city fights on.

The real article he swallows with his bourbon. Writes what pays for that.

It is not Russia that is situated between East and West. It is East and West that are situated to the left and to the right of Russia. --Vladimir Putin

It was an accident. But thank you too, Brian.

Abstaining from meat is something I would do for a while at a specific stage of cultivation, when phenomena arise that require the temporary modification, as taught by my taoist teacher. Usually for a week or so. At this time, you also avoid all contact with blood not related to meat -- stay away from hospitals, handle cutlery carefully, etc.. We were even taught not to eat a specific vegetable that looks and tastes like meat during this time, but it only grows in certain parts of China, and most people didn't even know what it is, with the exception of the Chinese from those parts, so that's a non-issue. The "generic" Chinese style of eating meat in moderation is indicated at other times. The teacher was vegetarian when he lived away from society and was engaged in intense 24/7 cultivation and had access to many herbs, roots, and fungi a city dweller who would attempt abstaining from what's available here and now has not the foggiest about; he eats meat in moderate amounts when living "in the world," and expects his students to be as flexible and adaptable to the here-now of their circumstances. There's many reasons why you can't apply the same rules to diametrically opposite lifestyles, perhaps for another thread. "Bigu" was reinterpreted to mean "fasting" later in the day, under the influence of other schools, but the original meaning was and for some taoists still is, "abstaining from grains," meaning "grains," not "food." The theory goes (and modern science has confirmed it in its own terms far as I'm concerned, though megagiant agricultural corporations won't let it make it too widely known) that there's Three Monsters or Three Worms that grow in the human body-mind-spirit when grains are consumed, who feed off the grains you eat. These monsters are a big obstacle to cultivation progress, so in certain schools of taoism, it is undertaken to starve them by abstaining from grains. The theory further goes that they blunt your senses and sensibilities, trigger faulty judgement, cloud your mind, obscure your spirit, and cause you to do things that are stupid, wrong, or even evil. Not stopping there, they then report to the gods on your wrongdoings, smearing your reputation in the celestial realm and causing you to "lose face." On a more mundane plane, they cause most chronic degenerative disease in all civilizations that were railroaded into grain agriculture. In my world they are the devil. The best thing that can be said about them is that they are easy to use as filler material when quality food is scarce, expensive, or made unavailable by unjust distribution practices of an unjust society. And they are highly addictive so people often enjoy the same high from them as they do from drugs (in fact they do work as drugs, by damaging the intestinal lining which is protectively set up to release endorphins, internal painkillers, opiates, and even LSD-like substances as a temporary defense -- you would be in constant pain from eating these goodies otherwise... as I was when I was a child, every piece of bread and every forkful of pasta meant stomachache after the dinner. This got blunted by age 13 and was replaced by the usual addiction -- but in most people this happens much earlier. Three months of "infant colic" (if mom eats grains, the stuff will be in breast milk, to say nothing of the formula) and bingo... addicted and comfortably numb.

Thank you for elaborating, Brian. And great going with the thumb! The technique you describe, of "flashes of memories of the future," sounds very familiar, except it is not necessarily the future of "this" life or even "this" dimension. I've experienced flashes of that spontaneously, and the interesting thing is that under certain extreme or special circumstances, they weren't/aren't flashes, they are whole chunks of a different reality, very detailed but effortlessly so. They have a ring of truth to them which I think some taoist techniques attempt to replicate by methods that would insure they work under any circumstances, not by chance, not by hit and miss but as reliably and to a great extent predictably as this-here "default" reality does. You know -- you put a kettle on the stove, you don't expect it to freeze. You put a tray of water for ice cubes in the freezer, you don't sit there watching with curiosity if it might catch on fire instead. This reality uses some rules. ALL realities do, it's just that the rules may be different. You won't freeze you kettle on the burning stove even if you don't know the rules in this reality. But suppose you wanted to? Suppose you wanted the impossible? Then you would want to learn the know-how of a different reality, it just won't "just do it" in the vast majority of cases... I see a bit of a parallel between "creating" instant different states of your choice (as in your example, the state of health where the ailment doesn't exist anymore) by "just doing it" vs. by training your faculties gradually and precisely to ultimately "just do it" exactly as you choose, exactly when you choose it, and "knowing" what you're doing, that can be drawn between street fighting and taiji. Some people are ready to fight when they have to -- they know how without knowing how they know, and come a fight they fight, and are victorious. Others don't know how to street fight, and might learn after many years of taiji. I had a guy like that in my class, he was bullied in school and his goal was specifically to learn to fight. Now that he has learned, by investing a helluva lot of work, no street fighter stands a chance against him. I mean, zero chance -- and perhaps even against a whole pack of bullies, he would be victorious. Does THIS make sense? Applied to healing, I am after the same certainty of skill, applied to magic, to cultivation -- anything -- I just don't want this to be a perpetual game of dice, of hit-or-miss. The latter can be spectacular when it works... but when it doesn't, it just doesn't, and then it is very frustrating to not know how or why it didn't, or how to make it work the next time around. So, in taiji, e.g., I'm taught to know, every step of the way, what I'm doing and how and why -- not "Intellectually" though the mind is not excluded, it's just not allowed to usurp what isn't its proprietary domain. It leads but it doesn't micromanage, so to speak. And I like this way to have everything revealed to you not at once (flashes don't stay put) but with heng, reliability and duration, the ability of a phenomenon to be counted on whenever you need it rather than to be whimsical. Heng, the lasting virtue of tao.

Curious -- why do you say "visualization along with intellectualization" in the same context? What kind of visualization do you mean? I was partially trained and partially self-trained in assorted visualization modalities, chiefly derived from raja yoga and/or other Hindu methods, before taoism, and later in taoist-proper complex visualization routines that are used in neidan. It is my impression that they are designed, among other things, specifically to break the habit of intellectualization, and are pretty good at that. The Hindu ones are often meant to unify the brain before you attempt unifying the body-mind-spirit, i.e. remove the unfortunate and nearly universal (conditioned and/or developmental) habit of being either a right-brainer or a left-brainer, or in the best of the worst case scenarios, switching from one mode to the other, without ever using the whole brain. So, our typical spiritual seeker or adept will be meditating successfully while sitting meditating, but try to get him to balance his check book in this state, or resolve a dispute. The switch is immediate and, to me personally, often shocking. So, a visualization (the good ones are, like, ten percent visual, ten percent auditory, and eighty percent kinesthetic/sensory) might involve a winter night in your left brain, with sounds, sights, smells, the temperature dropping, the snow melting on your mind's eye's eyelashes, the polar wolves howling at the cold moon -- while simultaneously you unfold a summer afternoon in your right hemisphere, the sun blazing, the flowers fragrant, the birds chirping, the sand under your mind's bare feet so hot you can barely stop yourself from skipping and hopping -- stuff like that. You can't intellectualize this, you can either do it or find out things about your own mind and your own brain you didn't know, the limitations you didn't expect to discover. Personally I never think of anything as "wrong" if that's what it does, reveals more of the real state of you to you. As you practice though, you are beginning to find, after a while, that you are losing these limitations one by one. After a while you can choose your state of consciousness and your state of cognition more and more freely, successfully integrating and gliding through states that used to be resistant to being experienced simultaneously -- e.g. deep and genuine, not fake, peace of mind while you're under attack... no small accomplishment, this one, IMO. And this extends to physical stuff -- e.g., you can be in pain but deliberately choose to know about it, not suppress it, and yet not be bothered by it, because you've deliberately and expertly placed your awareness on whatever else you've chosen to place it on. This is very different from the "skill" of numbing out and becoming unfeeling, flattened sensorily and emotionally. As different as a winter night in Siberia is from a summer day in California. Just switching states at the cost of sensitivity ain't the ticket. Integrating them consciously and by choice, integrating control and spontaneity (sic) -- that's the ticket. Hard to explain, don't know if I'm making sense...

Well, I'm back on Abstaining From Grains (which is close to, but not as strict as, the paleo a la Nora Gedgaudas I did before), so everything I said about corn is for those who eat it -- or for me if I eat it again. In general, I'm one of those people for whom food is not a big player health-wise -- there's hardly anything I haven't experimented with, but looks like I'm a true omnivore, and also a bit of a gourmet, and definitely not a glutton, so my attitude toward diets is pretty relaxed. I do what makes sense, and if it makes no difference, I change it and do something else. To me, missing out on a few hours of sleep is far more damaging than a whole year of random pigging out, LOL. Different strokes for different folks. But then, I don't eat harmful stuff by default (chemicals, preservatives, GM foods, excessive sweets, etc., don't own a microwave oven, have a gas oven rather than electric, get the best water I can lay my hands on, and so on) and have always made the healthiest choices available in terms of quality (not sparing the effort to cook -- from scratch); while those who come from a different dietary place may get more dramatic results from changing their eating style. By the way, a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist at a large psychiatric facility in New York asserts that all nutritionists whom the hospital sends to consult and counsel the patients on proper nutrition are mentally retarded. She firmly insists it's her professional opinion, and surmises it must be the requirement for the job.

I prefer the traditional ways to handle corn. And that's hominy, tamales, polenta, mamaliga, and the Native American corn pancakes fried in lard, and -- I stop just short of the Tarahumara corn flatbread seasoned with mice. Uncooked corn is something about the same percentage of population is unable to digest as the percentage of Asians who can't metabolize alcohol -- about 50%. However, cooking it does not eliminate all of the problems it poses when raw, but treating it with lye does -- which is why this is practiced by all peoples for whom corn has ever been a staple, and you make tamales, as well as all those traditional flatbreads and pancakes (delicious, nutritious, and highly digestible, also rid of the harmful lectins) out of masa harina flour and all its traditional cousins, pre-treated with lye water, a strong alcali obtained by leaching ashes (high in potassium carbonate, which prevents potassium deficiency and potassium-sodium imbalances eating untreated corn often provokes.) Nutrition is, as I never tire of trying to remind the practitioners of eating, the most complex science of them all. And the most reliable way to master it is to look to the traditional ways -- modern science, whenever it gets around to investigating these, always confirms their superiority... while ideas and ideologies around eating not rooted in those ways change and shift and make U-turns as often as the North Pole Star doesn't.

This is quite possible, though not widespread in the West. TCM would explain why too little of sweet stuff might not be good for you personally -- say if you have Stomach as your weak system, Heart as your strong one, you may want to emphasize the taste that nourishes Stomach (that's sweet) and de-emphasize the one that strengthens Heart (that's bitter.) The TCM Stomach system may extend to Spleen, which may be "saddened" by bitterness in some situations (the older version of Western medicine which talked about "humors" -- substances, functions, and moods different organs produced, much like in TCM -- used the word "spleen" to mean "melancholy.") In a more typical case, Western diets overnourish Stomach and starve Heart, but an individual body may be in a unique individual situation, so I wouldn't be too surprised. Sugar is used as a drug in TCM rather than as food, and it has its many indications in this capacity. Lungs are occasionally treated with sugar too (usually in the form of herb-medicated syrup, but straight up too -- e.g. sucking on a hard cube of sugar is indicated with irritating dry cough.) And Ayurveda has way more prescriptions for sweets than TCM, though there's few I remember off the top of my head.

This is something I never sacrificed even when I did some nine months of hardcore paleo in ketosis, i.e. in a state where you bypass the secondary/emergency metabolic pathways (that are, however, used as primary ones by all grain-agriculture-exposed peoples) that are set up to extract energy from stored glycogen in emergency -- so, you get out of that mode and restore/restart the primary, energy-from-ketones metabolic pathways instead. If you read the book I referenced, you'll find out what I'm talking about, so I won't get into details, but basically I avoided all starches and carbs and sugars and everything that contains more than trace amounts thereof completely -- with this one exception. I take one tea spoon of sugar with my cup of coffee (that is, per three heaping teaspoons of ground coffee), so my total daily consumption of sugar was from one to three tea spoons. This is about as much as you'll find in a tea spoon (not a can) of soda. And it didn't interfere. So, I wouldn't ask you to give that up, just watch the amount and don't go higher. As for fruit, I wouldn't be too fundamentalist with these (unlike my paleo guru), but I'd avoid all the overly sweet ones. This is hard in America, everything fruit is way too sweet for my taste, but if you stick with Granny Smith apples, some pears, plums, and (in season) berries, I wouldn't worry too much. But don't go bananas (pun accidental), etc., and keep the portions on the small side. Oh, and come Christmas, cheat. Someone convinced me not long ago that diets work better if you allow for a 10% margin for cheating -- this way you don't get desperate and don't fear that you won't have anywhere to run for cover if you already feel desperate and anticipate this to get worse. Just make sure you don't START with cheating -- give it three to four weeks of absolute compliance before falling off the wagon -- and be honest with yourself. 10% can easily slip back to 100% if you aren't. Good luck!

Yes, I'd go away from sugar if there was a diabetes risk. Physically and mentally (though not culturally and shopping-wise), it is surprisingly easy, it's one of those addictions that can be broken within 24 to 48 hours with complete abstinence, with no side effects and with cravings disappearing for as long as you stay away from the substance. This is one addiction worth dropping cold turkey, it is both non-taxing and efficient to do this way as opposed to cutting down gradually, which is difficult and for many, unrealistic. But you would also have to add a new source of fuel if you go this way -- high quality fat in high amounts. Check out "Primal Body, Primal Mind" by Nora Gedgaudas. You don't have to go strict and extreme paleo she advocates -- she is opposed to coffee, e.g., and calls it a "stimulant," using the language as a weapon against what she doesn't like -- this is common -- in reality it is, technically, "an herbal decoction" with such and such active properties and effects on the system, among them, yes, "stimulating," but also "antioxidant" and "dampness expelling" and "dopaminergic" and "dopamine-norepinephrine receptors preserving" and "diabetes-preventing" and so on. This you may want to make a note of -- there's been a large study that proved that any coffee, good or bad, in any amounts but the higher the more pronouncedly, cuts down diabetes risk, and dramatically at that. So, to single out ONE property of a complex active natural substance with complex and diverse effects on the system, and to love or hate this one property, is not an approach rooted in reality. But back to the point... so, you don't have to implement "everything," but you could get some valuable general ideas from this book, it's very soundly researched and easy to digest. Of course this is not the first, last and only word in nutrition. But if you are after breaking your bond with sugar, it may help.

The search for "pure" "active ingredients" to pry out of complex, synergistically harmonious natural substances (a pursuit started by Paracelsus and taken to its absurd extreme by pharmaceutical companies), is the diametrical opposite of what I'm about. I prefer shamanic experiences to pharmaceutical ones for all purposes, and coffee is just one example. For another example, I went with ayahuasca and turned down pure DMT flat. For yet another, when I did a little gardening, I had earthworms do all the work for me, never using chemical fertilizers. And so on.

I tried to 'install" your rubber bands for a moment and found that I would adjust them a bit. You don't want the vertical one to be angled backward, so don't put it at the back of the head -- instead, let it pass inside and emerge at the top of the head. Your body settles grounding into the earth, while your spirit settles grounding into heaven -- the spirit is uplifted. So your rubber band pulls down and up from the mingmen, and that's where your "heaven and earth" separate and unite (and create space for "life" to dwell). The horizontal one shoulder to shoulder may interfere with the rounding of the structure -- which is rounded at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, chest, back, etc. -- although not necessarily visibly -- so if you want to go with rubber bands, you may want to install them at every joint, one inside the shoulder, one inside the elbow, one inside the wrist. Instead of pulling shoulder to shoulder horizontally, you want a pull that separates each joint in a way similar to what you did with the spine -- into "heaven and earth," creating space in between, the head of each joint pulling slightly away from the socket. When this extends all the way to every joint of every finger, qi flows and circulates like water, unimpeded.

I wouldn't be. Good coffee is WAY more than caffeine in its effects, and the best is worth living and dying for, as they did in many places at different times. Bad coffee is good coffee plus bad treatment thereof minus some of the benefits. And caffeine in pure form is -- well, imagine loving a particular pure, strong, piercing note in a favorite symphony, and editing the symphony just so that the only thing that remains of it is this one note, amplified. La...laaa...laaaaaaaaaaa...LAAAAAAAAA...laaaaaaaaaaa...laaa...la... I'd shoot myself.

Thanks you, I was waiting for years for someone to notice the connection! Yes, Chinese medicine derives a lot of what it knows from its uncanny expertise in embryonic development. I discovered it when I was reading a book on embryology (Western, for MDs), many years ago, and was thrilled to learn that embryonic layers, distinct and separate starting points of development which proceed to form specific organs and systems, coincided to a T with what TCM asserted about particular organs "governing" such and such parts of the body -- the Kidneys "govern" the bones and the ears, the Lungs, the skin, etc.. This never makes sense to a Western researcher or medical professional who doesn't know embryology -- yet one look and they'd discover that the organs in TCM "govern" what develops from the same embryonic layer as the "governor!" And if this isn't enough to floor one's mind, I don't know what is! How did they know?.. Aha... here's where a real scientific inquiry could start... I"m not holding my breath though...

Assuming you grind your coffee beans yourself and buy them unadulterated with additives and/or subtractions, I think a more reliable way to assess one's coffee consumption is by the number of spoonfuls of ground coffee used per cup, adjusted for one's chosen method of extraction. (E.g., a cezveh extracts much more than a French press; a coffee machine without a filter, more than one with a filter; and so on.) If you don't choose the right beans, you may be drinking coffee that appears stronger than it really is. Bitterness may be misguiding in overroasted coffee -- but what it contains (and shouldn't contain) that accounts for the effect is not extra caffeine (there's nowhere this would come from) but, alas, aromatic hydrocarbons created by overroasting. These, on top of compromising the taste, are harmful (and a propos not limited to coffee -- any overroasting, overgrilling, overbroiling, e.g. of meat or vegetables, will produce them.) The word "aromatic" does not mean quite the same thing in organic chemistry as it does in common use, but it does hint of the reason manufacturers would want to overroast stale or moldy coffee -- this will cover up, to an extent, the loss of freshness, aroma, and flavor by substituting harshness that will dull the consumer's senses and also invite massive amounts of sugary additions. (You all know by now I hate burnt coffee, but I will reiterate. I hate it. There's no such thing as "espresso roast" or "French roast" or "dark roast," these are all industrial/sales/advertizing scams. There's only one roast -- the color of milk chocolate. Lighter than that is suitable only for coffee enemas some naturopathic practitioners use to combat cancer, and darker, for encouraging it, since aromatic hydrocarbons are strong carcinogens.)

Western thought does not prepare one for correlative thinking and the correct ways to apply it, so weaker psyches may crumble if they attempt this, and by the same token, attempting this without proper tools may weaken one's psyche. However, the only thing it proves is that we've been stunted in developing and using an innate ability productively, and consequently wind up making up false patterns where they don't exist (e.g. "high cholesterol causes cardiovascular disease") while failing to notice patterns where they do exist (e.g. "high toxic load on the body causes endogenous overproduction of cholesterol, which is a coping mechanism, and cardiovascular disease is the stage of overload breakdown of this mechanism.") Thousands of such false, imaginary patterns constitute our collective mythology, while thousands of real patterns go undetected -- our collective gauge for telling the true pattern from the false one is broken. (Whether deliberately or accidentally, don't ask me, all I will admit to is, I didn't do it.) And to illustrate a completely different approach to cognition, let me quote the great Joseph Needham: "The key-word in Chinese thought is Order and above all Pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism.) The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behavior inevitable for them... They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance." Enter ganying. The most magnificent tool of both existence and cognition thereof known to man and beast -- and the universe itself. Nothing in our bodies or minds works any other way -- yet "our" sciences don't see the pattern even when they discover that, e.g., all intercellular communication, all DNA replication, all genetic expression, and pretty much all processes of aliveness are executed via correlative resonance, not linear causality. In other words, they are designed just so as to be completely tone deaf to the music of life -- and proud of it too.