Taomeow

Ha, I remember driving my teachers nuts whenever the task was to use a bunch of confusing words in an essay to demonstrate you've learned them correctly, and I'd stick them all in one sentence to save time... like this: You're invited, and take your cats there, their presence is encouraged as long as they're being nice, we're thrilled to meet them -- they were missed where they didn't go the last time, then as now we would welcome more than one of them, and bringing two to our party wouldn't really be too many.

"Inflammable means flammable?.. What a language!" -- Dr. Nick

Saw the map of Africa with the purported ebola outbreak, alongside the map of Africa with Africa's largest oil and gas deposits. The two areas completely overlap. Yet another coincidence theory welcome.

Yup, BG was refreshingly addictive, as Homer Simpson would put it. I loved Caprica and can only guess how the males reacted -- the sexiest character ever. Reminded me of "real" stars, European legends of the older movies. As for acting, I was barely tolerating Adama-senior, he's supposed to be strength and courage incarnate and he's such a drama queen, every time things get rough he starts out by throwing a tantrum. One too many for my taste. Or ten. Loved the astrological twist of the plot. The Twelve Colonies! Far out!

No movie scene ever made me throw up with the exception of that moment in Battlestar Galactica when Boomer shot Commander Adama in the stomach. Of course I was already feeling fracked up of my own accord by then, due to some fishy ingredient in the gumbo they served me at the Crab Hut about an hour earlier, but I will never know if the gumbo would have been enough by itself. Battlestar left me with the word "frack" instead of its four-letter counterpart as a gift eternal, also "it all happened before, and it will all happen again" as my response to pretty much anything, and interchangeably with "archon" I use the terms "cylon" or "toaster" now. Oh, and the ending flopped, as they always do when the theme is too ambitious to resolve to any satisfaction in any TV show, but the opening line was simply incredible. "Are you alive?.."

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HE, thank you, great ideas. I sometimes get inspired like that by a martial movie too (though I haven't seen one in a long time -- any recommendations?) My greatest feat was my earliest, beginner's luck -- I was reaching for something on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet high above my head, without seeing what's there, and knocked off thence a porcelain tea pot I didn't even see coming. Next thing I know, I'm standing in a very low SIngle Whip holding the pot in my right hand and its lid in my left!

To all who were kind enough to lend me your ears (eyes): THANK YOU. :wub: Hi MNN, I subscribe to the 40-40-20 taoist view of destiny: 40% is written in the stars and can't be changed by an individual; 40% is the field of application of free will of the individual; 20% is left to chance, unpredictable, and can't be foretold or pre-planned even by gods. An example of the first 40%: you have/don't have an older brother. Of the second 40%: you marry Mary or Jane. Of the remaining 20%: the God of Longevity walks along the road carrying a peach tree branch with a few peaches from the tree of immortality which Xi Wangmu gave him after they had a nice chat at Jade Emperor's recent picnic. Two poor village boys walking in the opposite direction bow to him respectfully as they pass, and his heart warms up to them because of that and because he's in a good mood. "Wait," he calls after them. "Come here." The boys approach, he splits one of the peaches in two and gives each a half. "Here, a treat for you," he chuckles, and proceeds on his way. The boys eat the peach and immediately find themselves in the palace of the Jade Emperor among gods and immortals. "Who are these boys?" everybody wonders. "They look way too young and stupid to have cultivated to immortality. What are they doing here?" The Jade Emperor frowns and says, "Let's find out." He opens the great Book of Destiny and checks all the entries for this particular millennium, year, day, hour, minute. "Oh... oops... I see, that's how it happened... well... yeah, they're here by accident, they absolutely don't deserve to be here, but now that they're here I can't kick them out, this accidental encounter they had a minute ago is already in the book. We'll have to let them stay."

I'd like to hear more about this one.

Hi Liminal, no, not that, no aggressive impulses involved. The impulse is to perceive reality rather than any which make-believe BS ideology or "spiritually" motivated indifference to absolutely everything for as long as it's not biting your personal ass. I listed this as a taoist practice because I am convinced a taoist, no matter what else she is occupied with, must never slip-slide into comfortable numbness, and, discerning the nature of her time, sometimes keep her hand on the strongest pulse of this time. Know pulse diagnostics in TCM? -- this is mostly used to find out about disorders striking individuals, but the same skill can, and would, be applied to disorders of societies, of the larger world. You sort the symptoms broadly first: a yin or a yang disorder? External or internal? A war is a yang disorder, but then you have to figure out if it's the outcome of a yang excess or a false external yang manifestation of an internal yin deficiency. Depending on your conclusions, you proceed -- wuxing analysis, which organs are involved, what's going on with qi... Going up or going down? Blocked, stagnant, entangled? Acute or chronic? Self-resolving or not? Lethal or not? and so on...

Studying war Studying war Studying war Studying war Studying war (Cam, you said top five, right? 'cause I have other practices too, but the top five are, these days, these.)

Frack it.

A plentiful harvest and a good practice to you!

How do I post a spoiler rather than a straight-up video?

Got it, thank you, Flolfolil.

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I had a few occasions to experience and compare various types of work in the countryside. Of all the crops I'd come in contact with, from sugar beets the size of a teenage pig to onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, to apples, I think apples are the most detoxifying and balancing when you gather them because they hang between heaven and earth and you have to connect both whether you are a taoist cultivator or not. Besides, since they were old-world varieties of apples, of a couple dozen choicest and rarest kinds (they don't expose the population of most of the planet to what those are like, to prevent food-quality riots), I wound up eating them morning till night, day in and day out, for a month. At the end of the month, my kidneys were producing straight up apple juice -- and I felt agile and energetic like a panther from climbing up and down, up and down, hundreds of times a day. This inadvertent detox wasn't compromised even by parties every night with copious amounts of cheap alcohol and not much food aside from those same apples baked in the ambers, and an occasional potato.

The first, taiji48, was created in the 1970s for competitions. The second, taiji24, was created in the 1950s as a simplified taiji form for the masses. Both are eclectic, though the 24 is based mostly on Yang and the 48 has more elements added from other traditional styles. I don't practice any of these, being fully Chen, but people I know who do, who choose to learn many different styles, don't dislike them. They assert these are a good warm-up and are easy to use to prepare a beginner for the traditional forms.

Edit: removed with apologies to thoughtful participants of the thread. And with eternal banishment to the ignore list of the most vigorous derailers.

The above fact was offered in response to your assertion that taoist shamans would never sacrifice a chicken to save a child. Anyway, I bow out of the rest of this exchange, gotta go sacrifice some Rotisserie chicken to my cat.

FH, FYI: This is the sacrificial altar at the Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven (simplified Chinese: 天坛; traditional Chinese: 天壇; pinyin: Tiāntán ) in the southeastern part of central Beijing. The complex was visited by the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest. It has been regarded as a Taoist temple,[1] although Chinese heaven worship, especially by the reigning monarch of the day, pre-dates Taoism. Shangdi or Shang-ti (Chinese: 上帝; pinyin: Shàngdì), (Chinese: 帝; pinyin: Dì; "Emperor"), is a supreme god and sky deity in China's traditional religions. At a point he was identified as Tian, "Heaven", the "Universe", the "Great All". The annual ceremony at this temple, conducted under earlier emperors by shamans and later by taoist priests, was the largest animal sacrifice in history known to date -- one hundred oxen were slaughtered here every year, at winter solstice, and thousands of smaller cattle. This was part of the offerings to Shangdi that was aimed at securing his protection for the crops and preventing famine in the land. Reality is not always what any one of us is comfortable believing in. But reality is a fact. We can own our opinions but we can't own facts to dispose of as we please -- facts belong to everybody.

Shamans never used drugs. They used entheogens, sacred plants. The blurring of the distinction between drugs and plants -- that's not shamanism, that's Rockefeller medicine. However, being a shaman involves the ability to use whatever is handy to switch one's consciousness into a non-ordinary state. Entheogens can do this for most; but simpler things like monotonous drumming or even alcohol (used by Siberian, Mongolian, Korean shamans, e.g., as well as by many taoist shamans) will dumb down non-shamanic consciousness while the same "helpers" (or, in the language of tradition, "horses" -- anything can be used as a means of "transportation" to a different realm by a knowledgeable lineage-trained shaman) or, for the differently trained or predisposed, meditation or even prayer or even veneration of the Christian god and/or saints will do the shaman's bidding, switching her consciousness to the destination of her choosing. Why some shamans used sacred plants and others didn't is because the path is determined in the spirit world, and not by cultural fads of the moment in the human world. Different shamans received the aid of different helpers. Some had animal helpers, some had plant helpers, some had thunder, some had minerals (notably quartz, jade, and many others). Why did shamans experiment on themselves? The spirits told them to. Or the plants, minerals, thunder, animals, etc., themselves. Or their ancestors. Or their teachers. Why did some shamans not get involved in "animal cruelty" in the form of sacrifice? Animal sacrifice, in the genuine shamanic tradition, has never been associated with animal cruelty, and always was a moral choice. Kill a chicken to save a child. Kill a bull to save the tribe. Eat a carrot with the same moral reserve if you really understand the unity of life -- don't eat it if you are not hungry. The only law is "do not abuse power." Non-use of power is a form of its abuse. If you have the power to save the child, and the spirit who will do this asks for a chicken in return, use your power and sacrifice the chicken if you don't want to become a spiritual criminal in the eyes of the universal law. And so on. New age morality was implanted as a psy-op, incidentally.

Yes. After the fact.

I asked my teacher re question No. 2 -- the answer is yes. In fact, there isn't a single culture in the world that didn't use sacred plants at the shamanic stage of its existence. Taoism inherited this tradition in the form of external alchemy. There's even a vine in China with effects similar to those of ayahuasca, but the preparation is different since there's no vine in China similar to chakuruna (the second ingredient in the shamanic brew of South America which allows the first one to act, by inhibiting an enzyme that otherwise degrades it in the stomach upon ingestion. Incidentally, there's more species of plants on one square mile of the Amazonian rain forest than in all of Asia, Europe and North America combined. How did they know which one to pick to make ayahuasca work?..)

Sorry, I don't know (though I'll have to find out at some point) what it's called in English, I never learned this in English -- in the Russian translation it's referred to as "дух и свет," and both words have pages of meanings. But in any event, it's part of the whole method and I wouldn't know if it's of any usefulness by itself, without what is done before, during, and after. As for your progress -- you are a better judge of it than me I'm sure. I asked the master about the significance of these phenomena when they arise by themselves, describing to him what I occasionally saw spontaneously, before learning the practice. In particular, aside from the golden sparks which I always saw in the dark as a child, I sometimes see the slowly rotating yin-yang symbol, and the pulsating, shimmering "film" or "field" some bums describe, and I hoped he would tell me I'm naturally gifted and this is a sign of progress or some such. But he shrugged it off.