Taomeow

The tao is speaking a forbidden language now in Southeast Ukraine. In Southeast Ukraine, they tear down the yellow-blue, raise the red-blue-white. Raise the red-blue-white flag of alchemical change -- fire, water, spirit.

Thanks for the links. The first one may indeed be similar to what my parents had -- but it's $699, and a good ibrik that yields a superior brew if you know what you're doing is $15. Of course I'd love to have that machine too for when I have no time or patience to watch over the ibrik (and you do have to watch over it, that's the downside, you can't space out on it), but for one tenth of the price, no more. I already have one ridiculously expensive kitchen machine (a Norwalk juicer) and there were times when I used it enough to justify the investment, besides they are forever machines -- never break down and can be inherited by grandchildren and great-grandchildren (unless a solar flare knocks out the electrical grid and renders them useless -- something that will never endanger an ibrik), so I feel that, for a technophobe, I've already exceeded my quota. The second one, a vacuum siphon, I do own (a different model). It doesn't produce coffee that meets my specs. I occasionally make green tea in it, that's where it truly shines. The temperature is not high enough to extract what should be extracted from coffee and the pressure is all on the water but none on the grinds (pressure is an important factor for proper extraction -- an ibrik is designed to create it when correct proportions are used), so the resulting brew is weak and flat, in the case of coffee. However, the same gentle treatment it offers produces good results with green tea.

No, I don't know that machine. The best machine I know, which debatably could compete with the ibrik in terms of the final product's quality, was a German made slow drip device my parent owned when I was just developing my coffee discernment. It was a kind of a pressure cooker that jammed the liquid through the layer of coffee and the likes of it I was unable to find since. I've no idea what it was called. A Krups machine that seemed to be functioning in a similar fashion that I had for a while was no more than half as good. There's Italian ones of which some might do the job, but they are way expensive and I know for a fact that they won't improve on perfection that ibrik supplies me with, so I don't see a reason to invest. I came across one at a thrift shop once and bought it, but something was wrong with it, don't remember what it was but I donated it back. One more important feature of my coffee that Starbucks doesn't have is the water I use -- artesian, from a once celebrated local source that, unfortunately, is gaining popularity again so you have to wait in line in front of the watering hole more often than not. I refill my supplies every couple of weeks, and there's no going back to bottled water, let alone tap water which is really nasty in our parts. As for foods that can replenish jing, they are rare and far between and mostly exotic or expensive or both. Sea horses, oysters, mountain yam (nagaime), konnyaku, to an extent ox tails and some organ meats, to an extent shellfish, ginseng of course (but ginseng has to be old and the age of its consumer matters -- it has different effects on older and younger people), caviar. I'm currently exploring chia seeds for possible jing replenishing effects -- they are not Chinese, they are originally an Aztec staple, and there's things about them that make me think they may fit the bill, but like I said, I'm still studying them, both empirically and theoretically.

Of course I see it, Marvel. Supplementing intuition with Chinese astrology does not eliminate one's sense of metaphor -- if anything, it expands it. It means we are fucked.

In a discussion regarding the kind of energies coming into the picture come Chinese new year, I made this prediction on February 1 -- post No. 23 http://thetaobums.com/topic/33235-get-rid-of-the-snake-already/page-2 "It's a stallion, by the way -- a yang year we have, yang wood in the heavenly stem and yang fire in the earthly branch. Throw strong wood into strong fire, see what happens. Fire is the destructive phase of wood, wood is the mother phase of fire, but this time around we have fiery mother and she will discipline rather than nourish -- and the wood she meets with her fire is headstrong, stubborn, defiant, and powerful. All in all, it will be a year of rebellious moods involving people who are actually close and similar and related. This is the mood of civil wars. "

It's also interesting that when the guy in the video speaks all those intergalactic languages, the intonation is that of English, with the dropping tone at the end of a sentence. Even Mandarin Chinese sounds farther away from English because of its four tones -- a sentence can end on any one of them. And Cantonese or Vietnamese, with seven tones each -- forget it, you can never tell what the final pitch of an utterance will be. Of course it's possible that English was derived from one of those the guy speaks, that would explain it. (There's this idea floating around some curious minds that English -- Anglish, the language of the Angles -- is really Angelish, the language of the Angels, alien beings, and/or what's known to some cultures as Aggels, fallen angels/demonic beings... but I digress.)

Intakes of Antioxidants in Coffee, Wine, and Vegetables Are Correlated with Plasma Carotenoids in Humans1 + Author Affiliations Lipid Clinic, Medical Department, Rikshospitalet, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; *Institute for Nutrition Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; and †Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN AbstractThe consumption of fruits and vegetables reduces the risk of major chronic degenerative diseases. The active compounds and the mechanisms involved in this protective effect have not been well defined. The objective of this study was to determine the contribution of various food groups to total antioxidant intake, and to assess the correlations of the total antioxidant intake from various food groups with plasma antioxidants. We collected 7-d weighed dietary records in a group of 61 adults with corresponding plasma samples, and used data from a nationwide survey of 2672 Norwegian adults based on an extensive FFQ. The total intake of antioxidants was ∼17 mmol/d with β-carotene, α-tocopherol, and vitamin C contributing <10%. The intake of coffee contributed ∼11.1 mmol, followed by fruits (1.8 mmol), tea (1.4 mmol), wine (0.8 mmol), cereals (i.e., all grain containing foods; 0.8 mmol), and vegetables (0.4 mmol). The intake of total antioxidants was significantly correlated with plasma lutein, zeaxanthin, and lycopene. Among individual food groups, coffee, wine, and vegetables were significantly correlated with dietary zeaxanthin, β-carotene, and α-carotene. These data agree with the hypothesis that dietary antioxidants other than the well-known antioxidants contribute to our antioxidant defense. Surprisingly, the single greatest contributor to the total antioxidant intake was coffee. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2003 Oct;57(10):1275-82.Contribution of beverages to the intake of lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants in the Spanish diet. Pulido R1, Hernández-García M, Saura-Calixto F. Author information AbstractOBJECTIVE:To investigate the contribution of beverages to the intake of lipophilic and hydrophilic antioxidants in the Spanish diet. DESIGN:This includes the following (i) estimation of the daily intakes of beverages in Spain, from national food consumption data obtained from annual surveys of 5400 households, 700 hotels and restaurants and 200 institutions; (ii) determination of total antioxidant capacity in the selected beverages using two complementary procedures: ferric reducing ability of plasma (FRAP), which measures the ferric reduction capacity, and ABTS, which measures the radical scavenging capacity; (iii) determination of the antioxidant capacity in both lipophilic and hydrophilic extracts of the beverages; (iv) determination of the antioxidant efficiency of the lipophilic and hydrophilic phase of the beverages; and (v) estimation of the intake of dietary antioxidants from beverages in comparison with the daily requirements of antioxidant vitamins C and E. RESULTS:The contribution of beverages to the antioxidant intake in the Spanish diet is estimated at 1623 mg of vitamin E and 598 mg of vitamin C by FRAP, and 1521 mg of vitamin E and 556 mg of vitamin C by ABTS. Coffee is the main contributor (66 and 61% by FRAP and ABTS, respectively), followed by red wine (16 and 22%), fruit juices (6 and 5%), beer (4 and 5%), tea (3 and 5%) and milk (4 and 1%). CONCLUSIONS:Beverages account for a very high proportion of dietary antioxidant intake as compared to intake of antioxidant vitamins C and E. Although their metabolic effect must be affected by the bioavailability of the antioxidants, the significance of this intake for antioxidant status and health should be considered. PMID: 14506489 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Oh, definitely. Languages retain earlier wisdom... In Russian, the word for the abdomen, zhivot, literally means "that which lives" or "that which gives life," and in the older version of the language simply meant "life." The word for "animal," zhivotnoye, is of the same root and means "that which is alive." This is my experience of the "gut feeling" -- it's a feeling of life directly, without the mediation/interpretation of the neocortex. (Which is hundreds of millions of years younger, basically an infantile organ in evolutionary terms, with about as much understanding of the bigger picture of life as any infant has. In TCM, the upper brain still falls under the category of "miscellaneous and curious" organs.)

This is the traditional way. Coffee protects the lungs from the harmful effects of smoking (sic), while smoking protects the brain from unnecessarily exceeding coffee's stimulating effects on the excitatory synapses, since nicotine has an inhibitory effect on same. So the messages are not so much conflicting as balancing. This is used in TCM herbal formulas all over the place -- if a substance's effect is too strong on a particular function, another one will be added that will damp it down.

My thoughts? Except for the parts lifted from standard TCM texts, the author has no clue. He (or she?) blatantly imposes his crude homespun metaphor inspired by what he thinks he already knows about the world -- "jing is so much like crude oil it's uncanny" -- on a process that has nothing in common with it except on the street in his mind. Yes, it is uncanny how handy a simplistic metaphor can be when dealing with one of the most complex processes in the universe... no need to understand, just offer a familiar substitute -- crude oil -- and then interpret your substitute but pretend you are talking about jing. My post #242 on this page addresses the issue of jing and coffee, which was raised earlier. Basically, there's two ways to use coffee: the jing-depleting way and the jing-preserving way. The same is true for, e.g., water. There's ways to drink water that will dip into jing -- e.g. if you drink vast amounts before bedtime, it will have you get up in the middle of the night to pee, and this will dip into jing; you can drink distilled water continuously and this will dip into jing too, by depleting electrolytes it uses for its operations in the body; you can drink "dead" water with assorted toxins and this will dip into jing because its cellular mechanisms require structured small-cluster water molecules which only good water can provide; you can drink it cold, with ice cubes in it, and this will dip into jing because it will accumulate too much cold in the lower body, resulting in "dead jing" blockages; you can drink it with your meals and this will dip into jing, because your digestive juices will be too diluted to break down the food you eat properly, and jing depends on many of these to function smoothly (e.g. all reproductive hormones are reliant on fat and fat-soluble vitamins in the diet, among other things); and so on. Traditional coffee-drinking peoples who drink it traditionally (not Starbucks, which is bad coffee usually with an excessive amount of sweeteners -- liquid candy -- THAT will dip into jing every time, sure thing, sugar is indeed a scoop to dip into jing and deplete it, all neurotransmitters that run on its influx are made out of material taken away from jing, notably all its shortcuts to serotonin) have longer lifespans than average (e.g. the famous centenarians in the Caucasus). I've seen them in Armenia when I was 18 and they were a lifelong inspiration toward coffee. Extremely old (90s and beyond) men and women sitting outside their homes in the shade on a hot summer day, with friends and family nearby, doing nothing after a lifetime of activity, solemnly drinking crude-oil-black coffee all day, looking like biblical patriarchs and prehistoric matriarchs, bright curious eyes, alive with jing, strong bodies, invariably strong minds. Would that the author of the article met some of them too...

This looks like one of the yogic exercises for unlocking and restoring sensitivity to tense and/or numb facial muscles. When I do this exercise, no aliens show up, but I invariably wind up channeling a great big feline in a mood of extreme menace, and then it cracks me up and I start laughing. So it goes something like, "rrrrrr.... rrrrreowwmeowww.... snarl! snarl!!! Arrrweowmeowhhhhhhsnarl! Hahahaha..." This also takes about 45 seconds, and feels great. Did the alien make you feel great, Nungali?

Well, I think she gave me a true koan, multidimensional. You reminded me of that situation and just now I realized that I now understand some more about what she did, and since I had a long time to ponder it (I was 9 or 10 when it happened), I can attest to the fact that one function of the koan is to change the recipient's physiology, not just mentality. I've never had a relationship with sugar in my life! I put a spoonful of sugar in my morning coffee, and that's the end of it. Soft drinks disgust me, and as for chocolate, I make my own when I have the time and inclination, all commercial varieties are too sweet for me. One sip of that tea (I did take a sip, out of politeness and curiosity) taught my body something it never forgot. Another dimension: people's search for sweetness, for pleasure, for possession, for fulfillment, for "more." You can repair a lack by adding more... how do you repair an excess by adding more? "You can always add more," she said -- yes, most people live like that. When life doesn't seem delicious enough, they add more of something. And it makes things worse. It's not delicious enough because it has too much jammed into it, not because it has not enough. But mostly people look to throw in another spoonful of sugar trying to make it more enjoyable. Yet all the spoonfuls that went in there before are still there. The cup must indeed be emptied if one wants to get zen -- but what do you do with a cup that has too much zen added?.. How do you rid a life of excess dissolved into it? Can't fix that taste by dissolving more into it -- of anything, be it zen, sugar, or "experiences." Another dimension: greed and generosity are two sides of the same coin. Either one is going for "too much" -- in the first case, for self, in the second, for others. People need as much as they need. Less is not optimal and not good, more is not optimal and not good. Another... What's the source of greed? A lack, a poverty, on some level or on all levels. In the case of my relatives, they'd lived through the siege of Leningrad, which lasted for 872 days and was one of the longest and by far the deadliest in all of human history. The ironic part being that the head of the family was a superintendent for the Army, in charge of distributing tons of food, with direct access to any and all of it -- but unlike some people who used an opportunity like this for marauding and stealing, he was scrupulously honest and never took even a spoonful of sugar that didn't belong to him, nothing, he and his whole family were starving like all other civilians on the tiny rations of near-inedible bread issued in amounts that for millions of people were not enough to survive on. This is lifelong imprinting -- for decades afterwards, people who did survive it would hide bread under their mattresses, and, yes, add 20 spoonfuls of sugar to their tea. The feeling of being deprived is dissolved in your life's "cup" forever once you've indeed been deprived -- 20 spoonfuls of sugar added later can't fix that. So... I think it was a perfect koan, inexhaustible in its lessons.

I've been in this situation as a little girl once, so I know the solution. We were visiting our relatives in St.Petersburg (then Leningrad), my grandmother's sister and her family. They served tea, and the lady of the house went about putting sugar in my cup and I saw she wouldn't stop -- three, four, five, six, seven spoonfuls, and she kept going. "What are you doing?" I asked her incredulously. "Oh, don't worry, I'm not done yet," she said sweetly, and kept adding more. "I can't drink it like that," I said, thinking she'd lost her mind. "You can always add more," was the response.

Thank you for your kind words. What exactly is going on? Tao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two give birth to three, three give birth to ten thousand things. Ten thousand things, all having common parentage. Each of them will resonate with every "relative" it meets down the road. Like this:

Not uncommon. Ganying never happens once -- just like a musical chord (which on a certain level it is) has the "call and "response" in a musical piece, and the response is usually followed by a related call, and this one, by a related response, and so on, till the piece is done. That's what's behind the phenomenon the attuned describe so often -- to wit, if you start noticing it, "it starts happening more" -- well not really, it's always happening as much as it's always happening (always and nonstop), it's just that you start noticing more of it happening. It's like discerning a melody in the background of white noise, and then being able to hear the continuation, just because you've noticed -- resonated -- with this particular harmony. You have a chance to hear the rest once you've heard anything. Most of the time, however, people don't unplug their mind's ear long enough to keep following the melody. The whole world appears noisy rather than put together of related calls and responses only because so many pieces of music of so many different styles go on simultaneously. (some of them very tricky, very hard to harmonize.) Ganying is much easier to notice when you live in nature. Seemingly unrelated things that are really connected spell themselves out to you enough times for even the unobservant to start making connections. Birds flying low mean a high probability of rain, a hazy ring around the moon means a high probability of windy, crisply cold weather, more boys than girls being born to the villagers mean a war is coming, not next Tuesday perhaps but most definitely sometime in the next twenty years... and so on. We are too busy and chronically distracted to notice the whole sequences. But there's something about noticing even parts of them... some, as Brian put it, tingle all over the body. Ganying is perceived on many levels, some of them physical, and occasionally intense. Like the faint call of the flute responded to by the great drum, ganying can suddenly grow rather than fade out. That's what's behind the "butterfly effect..."

Y'all will probably agree that love is a great power. How do you test is "scientifically?" All true power is like that, and interestingly, hitting the wall every time you try to measure true power "scientifically" tells you something about what passes for "science" these days. Power over trapped, imprisoned, enslaved, or dead matter. Freedom is a great power. How do you measure the amount of freedom I have "scientifically?" Beauty is a great power. How do you measure it "scientifically?" Does its reality depend on whether you can measure it scientifically? Let's move on to more esoteric powers. I say I can move objects with my eyes when no one is watching. And I say there's a greater Self that knows if there's a hidden camera too, which the lesser self does not know anything about, and this greater Self won't teleport in front of it. It has its reasons. It knows that every power harnessed gets militarized. It does not want to give them this weapon. It won't show what it can do, ever, to anyone. Does it mean I am lying about the power?.. Or does the state in which this is possible require non-interference from prying eyes, for reasons their owners may not begin to fathom?.. And if you (the generic you) reckon nothing can exist that can't be measured or proved, how do you like the machine you've locked yourself in to live your measurable, mechanical, robotic life in?.. Nothing at all can be measured by methods of reductionist science except for things reduced to mechanical bodies stripped of souls. I say I can command the hurricane. Prove or disprove it. How do you measure what I did or didn't do to the hurricane, and what I did or didn't do it for? How do you measure love, or rage, or self-sacrificing altruism if you don't know what to look for? Karl Popper the great philosopher of science: "scientific" means "falsifiable." If you can't falsify it, it's not scientific. No one can prove anything scientifically that can't be falsified. Think about it... It's meaningless to go external to prove or disprove the existence or nonexistence of esoteric powers -- ANYTHING can be falsified that you approach from the outside looking in. Instead of wasting time on proving or disproving the falsifiable, spend it on developing the powers you fancy. This is the only way to prove -- to yourself, it begins and stops there -- that you are more, or less, than the common denominator. Stop trying to impress mommy and daddy and the world as a stand-off for mommy and daddy, see the kind of power this awakens. Get to a state where you don't give a rat's ass whether anyone knows what kind of power you have or don't have... Power begins there.

Interesting thought. I've manifested quite a few things indeed, but unless there's very strong emotional involvement on my part, or else deliberate acts of magic, I'm not aware of anything ever coming into being or nonbeing that I'm responsible for. For "reasons why" (if there is such a thing, which I often strongly doubt... that's the bee's knees of ganying, it can be acausal without being meaningless), I was thinking more along the lines of, the young American was the right age to be a Vietnam war veteran's son. Could it be that the whole unfolding had something to do with what HIS dad did in Vietnam?.. ( What the recipient did is known to me -- he suffered.)

That's the thing -- both are Vietnamese in a city where Vietnamese population is a fraction of a percent, heart transplants rate a fraction of a fraction of a percent, and Vietnamese killing someone to supply a heart to another Vietnamese -- statistically impossible. A classic case of extremely deep ganying.

I would like to get your take on the following synchronicity that's been bugging me for a year and a half. A year and a half ago, my acquantance's Vietnamese dad (a buddhist teacher at a local Vietnamese temple) got a heart transplant. The acquaintance, who has access to some inside info sources, was able to find out whose heart he got. (Normally the source is kept anonymous.) Turned out there was a fight between some Vietnamese youngsters in a parking lot of a mall, in an overwhelmingly Caucasian neighborhood. A young Caucasian male who was just passing by saw one of the Vietnamese pull out a knife, and mistakenly assumed that he could and should try to wrestle it out of his hands. He wound up getting stabbed to death. So, the young Vietnamese thug who killed him effectively saved the life of the old Vietnamese teacher.

Synchronicities are a limited Western understanding of the profound taoist concept of ganying.

No disagreement about that. In fact, your noticing the reversal of Dui and Zhen was the first-ever, and so far the last, assertion by ChiDragon regarding a taoist subject that I could agree with. You should have quit while you were ahead.

"Inside out" and "bottom to top" is the same thing, while "top to bottom" is the opposite of "inside out from the center." So if you know how to read them in a bagua inside out, you should understand that it's the same thing as bottom to top, just as I said it is, and the opposite of top to bottom, contrary to what you said. Earlier you suggested flipping them though, so you may be a bit dizzy from flipping the one you misread but not the others and trying to justify it by reading them top to bottom. No wait, you are not dizzy yourself, you are working on making others dazed and confused. Consistently. A wellspring of muddied waters.

Very briefly: there's two arrangements of the bagua, the Earlier Heaven (Xiantian) and the Later Heaven (Houtian). The first one represents tao-in-stillness, the second, tao-in-motion. The picture you posted contains an incorrect version of the Houtian bagua. I don't know where it's from, but I think the trigrams are used merely for decoration in this one. Unless they serve a purpose unknown to me in this presentation. I pretty much know what they "normally" mean. In practical terms, they teach an advanced practitioner how to move and settle qi properly. Here's the two correct versions:

Correct some more -- Gen8, not Gen3. And a trigram is read from the bottom to the top, no flipping required. To see that in the Northeast of the mystic picture they placed Zhen3, whereas it is the proprietary position of Gen8 in Houtian bagua, all you need to do is look.

In training it's pretty traumatic, that's how it works. My exposure to the realities of hard MA was thank god limited to a near-fractured knuckle since my TKD stint was brief. For full contact people wore protective gear. It didn't protect the emotions though, so this one young woman, who was perhaps the most talented student in no-contact situations, would break down and start crying when she was hit, not from physical pain as she explained, but from... well, she would resume crying at this point so I never learned why. As for me, I figured that my best bet is evasive maneuvers, not hurting the opponent, not getting hurt myself. The teacher used to pitch me against a 300 lb Korean guy, who could just swat me if he ever managed to lay a punch or a kick on me. He never did, I was at least twice as fast, and used that. From the spontaneous idea of "not hurting the opponent, not getting hurt myself," the shortcut to switching to taiji was, well, short.