Taomeow

聖 人 不 仁

Your diet sounds great. As for blood type considerations, I got this from the source -- Arpad Pusztai, the world's leading lectinologist on whose research all nutritionists who tried to jump on the bandwagon based their assertions (notably the falsifying plagiarist Peter D'Adamo). I was into that for a while, and very much into the science of blood types besides nutrition because it's absolutely fascinating (there's been quite a bit of research into that in some other countries, chiefly in Japan and Russia). So, me and two of my scientifically minded friends contacted Pusztai when we reached a level of understanding that generated questions to which D'Adamo and his later clones had no satisfactory answers. Pusztai is an amazing scientist, and is capable (and was willing) to explain the most arcane subject so that mere dabblers could understand. Long story short: 1) most food derived lectins do not agglutinate blood type antigens; 2) the few that do agglutinate them do this to all blood type antigens, no preference. End of story...

I am going to revisit paleo again -- beginning today.

Rethink strategies! Hitting this thread minutes late -- hits from the eighties. Hits from the eighties -- the land of the brave, the home of the free -- off-air.

Hits from the eighties -- the land of the brave, the home of the free -- off-air.

(fixing the 7-syllable last line to the 5-syllable standard) If you're alien, faces come out of the rain, no one remembers...

Letter to an Archaeologist by Joseph Brodsky Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht; a scalp so often scalded with boiling water that the puny brain feels completely cooked. Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden rubble which you now arrive to sift. All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven. Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived. Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron; still, it's gentler than what we've been told or have said ourselves. Stranger! move carefully through our carrion: what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells. Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels, consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.

I like to connect the dots... so, knowing that "Ebola outbreak in Africa" and "where Exxon drills for oil in Africa" are areas that happen to overlap on the map, I punched in "Ebola, Africa, oil" and here's what I've fished out: (From Ghana: Ebola is not real and the only people who have gotten sick are those who got shots from the Red Cross) http://beforeitsnews.com/terrorism/2014/10/from-ghana-ebola-is-not-real-and-the-only-people-who-have-gotten-sick-are-those-who-got-shots-from-the-red-cross-2450962.html

How about a purrito?

Gave us permission to iron our shoelaces, great overlords did.

..

So the conclusion is, it's not nature that's cruel, it's civilization-nature mix that's cruel. Every area of the world had remedies for cancer of course -- not that there was a lot of it before our "progress" went on a rampage -- e.g. TCM materia medica, which has tens of thousands of remedies for pretty much anything that can go wrong with a human being and believes in leaving no bruise untreated, however minor, has very little to offer against cancer, because it was so rare at the time the system was being created that most physicians never encountered it (I know the party line/brainwashing drill used against the argument that cancer used to be exceedingly rare -- "people didn't live long enough to get it." Such god-awful bullshit. Brain and blood cancers in infants and children 2-4 years old have increased twelvefold in the last decade alone, in case anyone's been researching...) Native Americans had bloodroot preparations -- these were still in use in the US in the 30's, I've seen a manual for oncologists from that period titled "Chemosurgery," devoted largely to this substance and its use to dissolve tumors.) Another substance used by Native Americans for tumors was tobacco, which, unless mixed with toxic chemicals as it is in our civilized commercial cigarettes, triggers apoptosis (natural death) in cancer cells and does not allow them to survive and spread in the body.

Of the words he made up, my favorite is Kundabuffer -- for kundalini.

You are forgetting Nature's Rule Number 4: "95% of everything online is shit." Here's a better take on the mantis symbolism: “Excellent hunter with an efficient attack strategy, the praying mantis always knows the right moment for attack and for retreat. Time in the linear sense is irrelevant to the mantis. They move according to their inner instincts and remind us to do the same. Moving effortlessly between worlds, the mantis is associated with time travel. They help us break out of linear time and move according to our personal bio rhythms. The praying mantis can remain motionless for an indefinite period. This ability helps them blend with their environment becoming invisible to predators. They hold the secrets of materialization and de-materialization and awaken this ability in people who hold this medicine. Perception through stillness is part of its teaching.” “Patient, perceptive and focused, this little totem holds a powerful message. When it appears in your life, it is asking you to direct your energy, your thoughts or your actions in a different way. Asking the following questions can give you the insight necessary to motivate appropriate changes. Have I lost patience with a particular situation? Have I been too patient, and if so, has this had a detrimental affect on me? Is my perception correct regarding a situation? Have I become narrow-minded? Am I focused on my objective?”

Kudos to all the observant people. If I see an uncommon creature, or a common one that behaves in an uncommon way, I go online and to my collection of books on "superstitions" of the world, and research what kind of an omen it is. There's always something. I also go to the Plum Blossom Oracle, a version of the I Ching that connects the hexagram you get to the things you observe in your environment on the day of the reading. A few days ago, e.g., a hawk was circling over my and friend's regular taiji practice (usually we get a yellow butterfly, I mentioned him in the Butterfly of the Day thread), and he started crying loudly and urgently (the hawk that is, not the yellow butterfly) and was at it for a couple of minutes, then flew away. So of course I researched. The outcome was unexpected...

Saw a picture the other day, a bee and a fly. The caption under the bee read, "this life, it's all flowers and nectar and honey, it's beautiful and sweet." Under the fly: "This life is shit, shit, shit, nothing but shit." Both are right, of course. So nature's rule number one is, who you are determines what you get. And then there's a Chinese story about rats. The sage went to the village outhouse and noticed some rats scurrying around, dirty, hungry, skinny, pathetic creatures. Then he visited the village bakery just a couple hundred li away and lo, there he also noticed some rats -- with sleek shiny fur, with big round bellies, fat, lazy, happy. The sage then pronounced something that Western real estate agents picked up two thousand years later: "Location, location, location!" So nature's rule number two is, where you are determines what you get. And thence I derive nature's rule number three... guess what that is. Whoever manages to master all three, flies above the clouds on transparent wings, lazily, like a rat with a buttered bagel in its teeth and a sting of invincibility in its tail. Like a dragon.

"Spirituality" in the sense the word is used in the modern West (as well as East, South and North -- no difference) is a completely meaningless made-up notion. In the real world populated by real humans, it used to mean being in touch with spiritual beings. You had your physical, mental and spiritual faculties as parts of the unified whole, and you had physical relationships with physical beings, mental communication with other minds, and spiritual contacts with the spiritual entities, and/or the spiritual side of unified entities. To be able to communicate with physical beings, you have to have a body. To communicate with other minds, you need a mind. To experience spiritual beings, and spiritual sides of the unified beings, you need spirit. If you don't have it, there can be no "spirituality." You can't substitute more of your physicality nor more of your mentality to replenish the missing part. You (the generic you) are going to make do with living in a world that's only 2/3 "there" -- 1/3 is missing. It's missing from the outside and it's missing from the inside. This is an existential disability. If you find a modality that holds the potential of treating and possibly curing it, I'd go for it. I did. Otherwise, you're right, don't bother. Everybody is only 2/3 human at best anyway, why would anyone want to be whole, "c'mon, everybody's doing it this way, and look -- everybody's mighty fine!" Why bother rocking this leaky boat. Let it swim some, then sink, end of story. Right?..

Here's how I do it: Choose a large variety of foods -- they have to fit MY season, not the season on the calendar, and they dare not bore me with incessant repetition, uneventful blandness, or tedious predictability. A great number of experiments. I don't pledge allegiance to any one way of eating -- if that was what I was after, I'd choose one of those fundamentalist religions that come complete with strict dietary rules, and just observe them, a no-brainer. Nutrition predates religion though, predates science, predates absolutely everything you've ever encountered in your life. It also exceeds everything you've ever encountered in your life in its historic complexity. It predates agriculture, it predates the ice age, and the tropics and herds of mammoths in the North Pole, and the great meteor that caused the Mediterranean sea to dry out -- any and all events that caused the primates surviving them to change the way they ate before the change, which was the only way for them to survive. Be aware and respectful of the fact. An integrative approach -- use your brain and what it learns, not just your body and how it feels after a particular meal, modern bodies are known to lie to their owners all the time. Some wrong ways to eat manifest as physical or mental disorders only years or even decades after they are embarked on -- not everybody is blessed with an allergy that will inform him or her right away what not to eat, some people have all their food-related health problems only in a latent form until it's too late. So, study, not just taste, what particular food choices are doing. Keep in mind it's complex -- don't fall for any one-sided story, look deeper. My pet peeve, e.g., is gluten -- it's not the same as what your great-grandparents had in their bread, it's at least ten times (or more) higher amounts per slice than what your great-grandparents were getting (selective breeding for "high protein content" of wheat, to say nothing of genetic modifications). So it's not enough to know that for centuries, a particular food item was eaten safely. Find out what it's really like today, it may prove very different... Pay very close attention to the traditional food combinations, but only those unaffected by any particular religious beliefs. Many are works of genius, it's hard to believe people didn't get this info from some omniscient source or other. My favorite example is beans with pork -- each food item by itself has some pretty harmful lectins, which however inactivate each other when cooked together, but not if cooked separately. Lectins were only discovered a hundred years ago, and studied in any depth only in the recent decades -- the depth achieved still pretty shallow though, they are still largely a huge blank on our map of food constituents, understood by few scientists and fewer (if any) nutritionists -- but apparently more important to understand than, e.g., vitamins. My other favorite example, of what not to eat together -- crabs and persimmons -- from the chart published every year with the Peasants' Calendar in China, for some two thousand years -- was thrilling to find scientifically explained two thousand years later, as I recently did. (I keep meaning to make public that Chinese food combinations chart which I had a friend translate for me. This will only appear in my blog though, things get lost at TTB as my experience shows, and things ancient might be worth immortalizing in a more search-friendly manner. ) Oh, and I did write somewhere a bit about what I learned from master Wang's lectures on nutrition. There we go -- don't feel like repeating myself, but don't know where to look for that entry... I'll change the immortal techniques to blog entries, I swear.

I like my millet with tons of butter and some sugar. That's how it was served in my childhood. I don't like it any other way. Got to be toasted too before being cooked, makes it more interesting. Buckwheat, on the other hand, is good any which way far as I'm concerned. As versatile as rice, but not being, botanically speaking, a grain or a grass (it's actually related to sorrel and rhubarb), it offers the benefits of two worlds -- behaves like a cereal but is a vegetable -- and has plenty of good stuff nutrition-wise, on top of tasting great if you know what you're doing (if you don't, toast it too before cooking. )

Hey, in this case you have to discover Kharcho, the great soup of Georgia (not the state, the country) which is, hands down, the best soup with rice in existence IMO. There's many online recipes in English I'm looking at, but I haven't found THE one that my Georgian friend's mother taught me to cook ages ago, which includes oil-cured black olives. Of course some other ingredients would have to be modified too -- you may not find tkemali plums but you can get tamarind from an Asian grocery instead (go for the sour variety, not sweet), and don't try to make this hearty fatty-lamb wonder of culinary skill into a vegetarian dish (there's recipes for vegetarian kharcho out there too, but I would strongly recommend going with the original, classic version, and that's a lamb, tomato and rice soup.) You'll see some recipes with beef instead of lamb -- that's acceptable, though not as great. You'll see suggestions to trim the fat off the lamb -- don't. Otherwise, choose the recipe you can manage (some are very complex, some, unnecessarily so -- as long as you have your main ingredients and don't skimp on the herbs and spices, you can't go wrong with this). This soup is served very hot (if you want lamb to shine in any dish, this is the rule of thumb -- lamb fat is great when piping hot but disgusting if it starts cooling off), tastes even better on the second day than on the first (so make plenty), and cures SAD (I'm not kidding) in those who are prone to it.

Esoteric teachings encoded in this kind of poetry usually target several levels of perception/awareness. One can bypass the decoding attempts altogether and grasp the whole for face value -- just go for a visual, sensory, emotional, even existential image -- and feel that it's "all there is" and that it's enough. This image deemed "enough" is not necessarily universal, however. It can be very intimate, speaking one on one to one's own unique image-making machinery. (E.g. for me it evokes a ride on a camel I once took, and a certain underground lake in a cave, with water reflecting on the wall in a way that made the stone flow and wobble and shimmer, while the lake itself was completely still. No one else sees and feels these, but that's the trick with great poetic images -- you see them and they see you, you look at them and they look back at you, you look into them and they look inside you, and animate your own image-making machinery -- it springs to life and, voila! -- an image is born, via the great universal process of co-creation.) But the art of decoding of the hidden layers of meaning, intent, and transmission (sic) is in no way inferior to the knack and luck (or skill or attainment, whatever you call it) of grasping and grokking the whole. They are facets of the same diamond, and the poet puts painstaking work into making each facet shine -- there's no shining whole if this work hasn't been undertaken. Of course sometimes it's all done for you and your diamond of a poem just falls in your lap, complete. But then you don't know how it's made, don't know how it's done, and are never sure you'd be able to replicate it. So, working on those facets is noble and can be as profound (or more so) as just being illuminated (or blinded, more often) by the perfection of the whole without having actually contributed to its existence. Mark has done spectacular work on one such facet, and it shines. I do believe there could be, probably are, more and different ways to look into this poem as you would into a crystal ball. This one is not one of those with which I spent a long time looking in and being looked back at, so all I see is the swaying, trance-inducing pace of my (alas, only for a short while) magnificent camel and the flowing wall of an underground cave over a still lake (alas, disrupted soon enough by some tourists who never noticed the miracle and whose out-of-place loud voices are now part of my personal embedded/embodied memory of that particular miracle). But I've looked into some others like that, and I know there's much to see. So... don't rush, folks. Don't jump to conclusions. Spend some time looking, feeling, tantalized, wanting to know, knowing -- yes, knowing, it suddenly comes and it's a thrill second to none. Thank you, Mark.

If you have a cat or a dog, you name them for mutual convenience of communication. My cat knows his name, he also knows he's not his name. The only function of the name is to shorten the distance between the cat "over there" and me "here" -- it's like a soundwave leash, I can pull it and he will come close. I have to use my hands to stroke and hug and feed him, my eyes to look at him, my ears to enjoy the purring, my presence to make him feel wanted. I use his name when I want him to know I'm thinking of him, but I don't think he thinks I'm thinking of the name, I believe he knows I'm thinking of the real thing. The name can't purr, but it can indicate to the cat that I'm interested in hearing some purring. My cat is a good cat, so I call him Haomao. If he's being a bad cat, I cancel his name, by calling him Bu-hao mao ("NOT a good cat.") He doesn't care...

Yi (易)

If the Great Mother wanted tigers to be vegetarian, she would have created zebras. Actually... she did. By the way, I've a poem in the "Mystical poetry thread" that is somewhat related... True story too... http://thetaobums.com/topic/32507-mystical-poetry-thread/page-14#entry570245

War...