Taomeow

removed with apologies

removed with apologies

removed with apologies

removed with apologies

removed with apologies

removed with apologies

"God will not shoo flies from a tailless cow" -- African proverb Neither will tao. Protect yourself. Think of people and organizations you can ask for help, think of what you can/should do yourself. Tao gave the cow the tail, she gave you your human mind. Use it. Tao gave you the tools to manage, but she won't micromanage. Using the tools -- all tools of protection at your disposal -- that's what "going with the flow" means. Good luck.

Maybe. But there's so many deities in taoism... one would have to be prepared to have the answer to "WHICH DE-ity?" -- are you? While "inTEgrity" seems to express what De/Te is all about... It is a "virtue," but not something that can be separated from the bearer of this virtue, you can't "have" integrity without "being" unified onto yourself, equal to yourself, rather than to any part of yourself. And that's tao. That's the only thing that has complete inTEgirty. So I tend to agree with your equating te/de and unity in taoism.

This logic is called "a pun." Comprehension of puns requires proficiency in the language in which they are executed. This may (as in my example of "Te in inTEgrity") include proficiency in this language's rules of engagement with other languages when phonetically, grammatically, semantically, etc., transporting their original notions. There's a whole bunch of linguistic terms applied to this process of one language acquiring words of another into its own circulation, different for different types of such acquisitions. E.g., the original spelling of my name is Таомяу, while Taomeow is a Romanization following standard rules of rendering Cyrillic words readable to English speakers. Once it has been Romanized, a foreign word can then be used by all English speakers in accordance with the rules of the English grammar, lexicology, semantics, stylistics, phonetics and so on. E.g., these rules allow them to make a verb out of it following standard English grammatical protocols existing for the purpose -- as in, "she taomeowed her dissent;" or an adjective should it please them -- "that was a taomeowy post;" and so on. No limits on creative applications provided certain rules and patterns are followed that would make these creative applications recognizable and comprehensible to native or proficient speakers of English. With this in mind (and with my reference to Wade-Giles as an aside), go back to my pun and give it another try.

Are you trying to chi_DRAG_ON a pun?

It's not necessarily sad, it is what it is -- the 80/20 rule in action. It applies to everything. Actual percentages may vary, but the tendency is an ironclad law. 80% of all tasks are accomplished by 20% of all participants. And let's not forget that to these 20% the 80/20 rule applies again -- i.e. while 80% of the original task, Task A, is accomplished by 20% of all Task A Work Force, a closer look will reveal that it's 20% of these 20% who are responsible for 80% of the 80% of Task A accomplished. And so on. That's how you arrive at the same 6 posters out of 1000 participants. No matter how many people participate in anything, and no matter what this "anything" is, most participants don't do shit. And then, for those who actually do something, the 95/5 rule kicks in: 95% of all things done by anyone doing anything is shit. We've all heard this said about the internet (95% of everything on the internet is shit), but it's not fair to single it out like that. The 95/5 rule is another universal law. At least in our time.

I noticed years ago (Wade-Giles times) that "Te" can be found in "inTEgrity."

Bye snow-dumped '14... Black letters land on paper like crows on dead snow...

Still kinda cozy, still croaking global warming.

To say nothing of their intimate ties with the occultist Nazis. (rapidly closing this particular can of worms. Slam.)

Really? I didn't know that. The human skull has a rather distinct structure though, didn't know it's that easy to fake. Not impossible, but wouldn't it require more labor and expertise than procuring a real one? Among the most unforgettable things I saw in Lima, Peru, at the Franciscan monastery was a whole bunch of large round pits in the catacombs, each filled with either human skulls -- a layer ten meters deep -- or with the thigh bones (both a favorite of the Skull and Bones society that supplies so many overlords to this country), arranged in concentric circles. The guide proclaimed, very rapidly, that these have no significance whatsoever and were collected and arranged like that for no reason at all. I'm not kidding. That monastery had other unforgettable stuff -- e.g. the monks' dining hall is adorned with a huge painting (from circa the 17th century if memory serves) depicting the Last Supper, with Jesus and the apostles drinking ayahuasca. Oh, and eating a roast guinea pig.

Not really, because the next line is, "One gives birth to Two," which makes "duality" tao's beloved grandchild, while "one" is her child. It's all in the family. "No duality" is a state that always gives birth to duality, and vice versa. "To and fro goes the Way." Taoist-proper cultivators do not seek nonduality as a destination, they seek freedom to choose. It's like going or not going across the border of one really and truly free country (your dual, taiji, yin-yang self in harmony with tao) to another (your non-dual, wuji self in harmony with tao). You may go on a vacation, you may emigrate permanently, you may repatriate if you have changed your mind... you decide. That's what tao is about. Not oneness and not not-oneness, not duality and not "no duality." It is about freedom though of course it does not "equal" freedom. It does not equal anything but herself, and patterns herself on herself, not on oneness and not on nonduality (neither of which is equal to the whole enchilada.)

You test it by poking it with a needle heated red hot. If it smells like barbecue, it's real. If it smells like plastic, it's plastic. The same method is used for amber -- and that's why a gift of an "amber skull" went on a garage sale in my household instead of on the altar. Except with amber you sniff for pine resin, not barbecue.

"Tao gives birth to One" -- Laozi I don't know how popular it is but it is the one most widely known. This one line is sapienti sat to conclude that taoism views "oneness" as a derivative. Tao is not one nor not-one, tao is the mother of all things, including oneness. Tao includes being and nonbeing, oneness and not-oneness, and so on. Indo-European indoctrination often entraps folks into equating tao with this or that kind of oneness they are already at home with -- one true god, one awareness, one mind, whatever they think calls all the ultimate shots. But the moment someone says "something gives birth to oneness," some taoists become acutely interested in that "something" -- much more than in that "oneness" which is merely one wayward son of hers.

.

A few days ago I saw a teenage boy stand on one leg on a vertically mounted log embedded into a collapsing cliff, part of an old structure that was intended, and failed, to stop the collapse. The abyss underneath his feet was not as deep as on Mt. Huashan, just about deep enough for the fall to kill him if he made a wrong move. A bunch of his friends were watching. Awesome balance, awesome courage. It was along my walking qigong trail, which is narrow (running right along the edge of the cliffs over the ocean, but safe if you don't think up something adventurous), and I had to stop and watch. Three thoughts flashed through my mind: 1. Damn video games, they raised a whole generation that can't tell real from virtual. 2. I should take a picture. 3. Daoists don't risk their life unnecessarily, this boy is awesome but he's of another world, a world where life is not valued, something else is. I didn't take a picture because just as I was going to, he wobbled, and I didn't want a young death recorded on my phone, bad juju. Then I remembered that I did stuff of this nature when I was a kid too, remembered the thrill. I stopped taking crazy risks when exactly, I asked myself. Oh... when I was pregnant. That was the end of a sense of invincibility I had when the only life I was responsible for was my own.

What taoists might do

Taoists don't do things they don't do better than non-taoists do things they do. E.g., Zen buddhists "wash their bowl." We don't.

There's few things I detest more than "for your own good" spiritual interventions that weren't asked for by me or authorized by me in an explicit "yes, do what YOU think is best for me" declaration of surrender of my own best judgment and spiritual freedom. "Their" idea of what's good for me may be light years away from mine, and in case they do have some juice, it may be mediated by entities I'm at war with. How they will go about "improving" my situation may be similar to an armed coup in the spiritual realms. I see such interventions as an expression of spiritual colonialism at best, and spiritual fascism in a more typical case. Ugh. If you (the generic you) don't believe me or the OP that it's seriously fracked up to do this, why don't you approach a mosque and offer to the congregation to pray to Jesus on their behalf, asking him to forgive their sins and to bless them with his one true blessing. And then go to the nearest Catholic church, spread a praying rug, turn to Mecca, and tell them that you are praying to Allah to help them find the true path. Just let me know in advance when you do, I'd love to film what transpires.

Yup -- and the pearIs were far from lost. E.g. this book, which I own, includes a helluva lot of folk medicine meticulously collected from every region of China where its use had been handed down via oral tradition and hands-on practice without ever making it to the classical texts or enriching and socially uplifting a single physician. In fact, Communists had to resort to threats and coercion to force folk practitioners to surrender their secrets that for many generations were being only taught by father to son and mother to daughter and guarded with extreme care. Some of the information therein blew my mind. (E.g. folk herbal contraceptives that are apparently about one hundred percent effective, with no side effects, which are taken once, in one single dose, and work for a whole year -- or a different formula which works for three months, should you change your mind sooner. Neither classical Chinese medicine nor Western have anything even remotely this good for the purpose.) When people realize that the practice of medicine is the practice of power (incidentally, in Native American tongues these words, medicine and power, are interchangeable), they might start understanding what is, was, and will be happening to medicine -- any medicine anywhere. It has always been a power struggle, first and foremost. The winners have always been the most ambitious, not the most talented and compassionate and knowledgeable. Which is one reason we don't have a great medicine anywhere for any purposes, at best we have pockets of mediocre or not-bad medicine here and there, against the general backdrop of atrocious medicine (the most glorified kinds are overwhelmingly in this category). But don't let me digress...