Taomeow

Yes, kinesthetic sense dominance is part of it, but it's more than that. It's a kind of intelligence by different means, occasionally giving me proof that it far surpasses the intelligence of the neocortex. E.g. it predicts the future, I think I wrote about it at some point -- the LDT supplies me with forecasts that I have learned to read as "warnings" and "promises" -- one hundred percent accurate. It's hard to always do what it says because for one thing it's nonverbal and it's up to my upper brain to "get it" correctly and choose my plans accordingly, and for another, the messages bypass what we normally utilize when planning for the future -- ignorance of certain factors we can't consciously perceive, wishful thinking, "hope," justifications and intellectualizations, all that cognitive noise. The LDT just knows "what's in it for me," so to speak, and tells it as is. And whenever you're not ready to hear the message, you try to ignore it... but in a couple of extreme situations it basically yelled at me, so I couldn't ignore the warning, it kept "yelling" till I changed my understanding of the situation and, accordingly, my inner "readiness" and my external plans. It can be very extreme. But in more mundane situations, it can be just a whisper... and I'm learning, trying, to listen to that whisper at all times, because it never, ever lies.

death is but a word, a subliminal message: yvan eht nioj.

As never before, the pearl shines while the oyster is eaten alive.

To tie the two emergent and seemingly unrelated topics of the thread together, I should perhaps mention that I store grammar in the lower dantien. Always did. There's even an NLP term for someone exhibiting this phenomenon: "kinesthetic speller," although when I say "grammar" I mean considerably more than just spelling, more like nearly the whole of linguistics, semantics, stylistics and so on. My lower dantien facilitates (or, occasionally, initiates, or, if there's too much competing stress, sabotages) the creation of templates for structuring a language, any language, English, music, taiji, interior design... anything that has a meaningful set of rules that can and should be applied first exactly, then creatively, to mastering a particular set of skills or grasping a particular body of information. This may not be immediately understood or even believed by visual or auditory spellers (more NLP terms) who constitute the majority of the modern populations, this is atavistic -- from prehistory. People didn't always rely so heavily on their sight for information, the lower dantien used to be the primary organ of perception, having this advantage over sight that it perceives and processes both external AND internal information simultaneously. This gives it an opportunity to come up with a structure that is external-internal non-contradictory, i.e. basically lets you internalize and, in a sense, embody any learned skill. The middle and the upper dantiens, which also used to be fully operational from birth in prehistory, have different functions, but I won't say much about them since these are both learned skills in the process of being cultivated for me, whereas a functional lower dantien is, like I said, something I was born with, something that worked without me having to work on it from the get-go. (Of course now that I know what else it can do, I don't have to stop there... )

Chaos is inherently self-organizing. They make a mistake positing an external source required for processes that locally lower entropy by universally increasing it. The very existence of the external source of energy is the outcome of the availability of a larger source of self-organizing -- the sun, e.g., is not a piece of chaos, it's a chunk of order. Life does not utilize chaotic energy, it utilizes pre-organized, structured energy. To structure energy into pockets of order is an inherent ability of chaos, which neither has, nor needs, an external source. Where would THAT come from?.. Our physicists can't break away from some god-creator in the final analysis, they always have to externalize something to build a model of anything. The whole line of pre-trimmed interpretations of the facts they are observing strikes me as expansionism applied to physics, an ideology of a parasitic mode of functioning trying to prove it is the only mode of functioning possible. Feed off something, exhaust it to extinction, move on. They call it "evolving." I call it cognitive blindness. Life functions by balancing rather than increasing entropy. A cooled-off room-temperature cup of coffee won't heat up above room temperature unless I drink it. Then it will, beautifully. Here, I just did it. I organized a local entropy-lowering event, that's the whole point of my being here. The sun which let the coffee tree produce the coffee beans effectively accomplished the same. The galaxy that produced the sun accomplished the same. The chaos that produced the galaxy produces local self-organizing entropy-lowering pockets of existence by itself, ziran. It is one of its inherent properties, or as a taoist might say, virtues. Life as we know it is just one fraction of the fractal of self-patterning, self-organizing, entropy-balancing whole (tao fa ziran, chaos organizes itself into patterns naturally). Prigogine, incidentally, got into chaos and fractals later in his own development -- and whoever missed this particular bandwagon is bound to miss everything...

And then there's me who lived under both communism and consumerism and noticed there's not much difference -- both are forms of corporatism, the only difference being that when they give you communism, the government owns the corporations, whereas when they give you consumerism, the corporations own the government. Considering there's also a fully functional revolving door for government and corporate overlords to go there and back, incarnating now as CEOs, now as senators, now as General Secretary of the Communist party, now as president of the USA, now as owner of a military contracts cartel, now as the head of the FDA, now as the manufacturer of pharmaceutical drugs... ...both are corporate governed idiocracies, where corporations get to be the boss and populations get to be the idiots.

Reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Marge got to hang out with some bikers who allowed her to teach them some verbal skills. She had them write something down and one of them goes, "Oops... Mrs. Simpson, I killed my pencil." "You mean you broke your pencil. Broke your pencil." "OK. I... broke him."

What I usually pay attention to is how the language offered as standard manipulates, distorts, and standardizes consciousness. A quick example: how often do you say something like, "we invaded Afghanistan," "we attacked Iraq" and don't notice that you have been manipulated into unconsciously identifying with entities of power and taking responsibility for their acts of use or abuse of power without you personally having even a smithereen of this power? Did you personally invade Afghanistan? Did you personally attack Iraq? Think about it... By saying "we" we accomplish several things required of us: -- we absolve those who did it by accepting their doings as our own; -- we let someone else do things on our behalf and are willing to pretend that we had a conscious choice and made a decision; -- we empower them and disempower ourselves by reducing our own meaningful activities in the world to what THEY do on our behalf; -- we behave as parts of a machine which identify with the whole machine and can't act independently of it -- someone else controls the machine but we accept the button that controls it as our own free will; -- we get used to blurring the distinctions between real and imaginary, true and false. In reality, I, me, personally, was in Tijuana, Mexico, taking care of some family business, when the American military following the orders of the American government attacked Iraq. I did see the attack on TV. That's the full extent of my participation in it. There was no "we" attacking Iraq. There was a "they." -- and quite a bit more I don't want to get too particular about at the moment. So, for starters, I do not use the grammar of mass indoctrination, protecting my mind from involuntary brain-jerk responses to manipulations. To continue with the above example, I try not to say "we" unless I actually participated in what "they" did. If I must refer to the event I wasn't a participant of, I try to say only what I have personal evidence of having happened -- "they report that such and such military following orders of such and such government did this and that." I try not to say "we are in recession," I say "they report the country is in recession." I never say "we went to the moon," I say "they assert they went to the moon." I try to say what I know to be true. I know they say it, It's true that I know that they say it. That's exactly how much I know. So I don't blur the distinction between what I know and what I don't if I can help it. And it helps tremendously to maintain a clear head and claim my consciousness as part of what I, me, choose it to be part of. Try this at home, you might be surprised...

ffr

Nathan, drop a line to the member of this forum Zerostao, he is in Kentucky and has been initiated into a taoist sect he might be able to tell you more about.

The famous Chinese novel "Journey to the West" describes a journey from China to India. So, "Western" and "Eastern" would have to be detailed a bit before we can compare them. To a taoist, prana is a Western idea. So is a light body that develops "after the mortal coil falls away." Taoists of the old school are not big on drawing a sharp demarcation line between the body and the soul, nor view the body as an inferior or lower manifestation of existence. It is comprised of light and darkness -- and the moment it loses the darkness, it loses the tao and acquires a Western Luciferian paradigm. The methods are similar here and there because the material they work with is similar (to say nothing of the shared proto-sources) -- a human being, plants, animals, earth and heaven, stars and planets, etc. etc.. But all similarities end when you compare the goals. Western systems are en route to a "destination," the ultimate something or other -- pure this or that -- the highest at that, never level with wherever everyone else is, invariably on top, up there, away from here, from this earth. Taoist systems are "moving to and fro" so as to blend in with the tao and emulate her ways -- tao-in-stillness followed by tao-in-motion, the high and the low, high becoming low, low becoming high, and the like. Stars come down and become emperor's ministers. Ministers rule wisely and get promoted to gods. Gods who rest on the laurels and start slacking, forgetting their earthly roots and people who depend on them, get demoted and thrown away. Taoist immortality is thrilling, almost a soap opera. Western -- I dunno... So you become pure light, you've arrived, you can frame your diploma and hang it on your wall of pure light, all the way on top of the pyramid of pure light, the highest of them all so you can't climb up any higher... and now what?.. Eternal more of the same?..

And sing silent chants, ong namo gurudev, ong namo gurudev.

Pictures on the wall, most of them pictures of walls covered with pictures

I saw it all from the window of my carriage as I was passing by. The road winding through the ancient forest of enormous oak trees was all covered in acorns, but I couldn't hear them crunch under my wheels because I had my band-in-a-box device turned up to full blast, playing the overture to Rossini's Wilhelm Tell. I had all my windows rolled down, so I was only half surprised when a giant wolf suddenly sprang our from behind one of the elephantine tree trunks and jumped right in, onto the front passenger seat. His front paws slid awkwardly across the dashboard -- I was grateful that the music drowned out the screeching scratching sound the two-inch-long claws must have made, a sound I hate regardless of its source ever since the chalk on the glass blackboard in the fifth grade and the occasional ill-mannered dining companions who wouldn't think twice before viciously stabbing their plates with their forks in pursuit of morsels. The wolf hit his head on the inside of the windshield, his jaws slammed shut with a clang that I also was grateful for being unable to hear, and finally settled on the seat like an ordinary suburban dog. Then he slowly turned his head to the left and regarded me with his pale yellow, magnificently clear and bright, and potentially blood-thirsty eyes. I turned the music down. "Hungry?" I asked the wolf sympathetically. "Grrrm," was the response. "English, please." "Awoooo..." "You mean you would... you mean you would eat something right about now if I was kind enough to offer it. Well I am. Believe it or not, I have raw shish kabob in the trunk. Lots of it. I'm headed to a picnic. I'm meeting some friends at the Copper Lake -- you know these parts, right? Copper Lake? Where all members of my... er... group always gather every... nevermind, you don't need to know the details. Suffice it to say that the shish kabob is grass fed lamb from New Zealand and I marinated it myself in a mix of... nevermind again. Would you like some, my friend? Or would you rather just tag along and wait till it's roasted, well done, medium rare, rare or as rare as it gets? Your choice. You are invited." "Wowowow. Wow."

Something that facilitates full expression of your human potential. Creativity falls short. There's infinitely many ways to wear a pair of shoes creatively -- you can balance them on your head, tie them to your ass, strap them onto your face or your privates, suspend them from your neck, tuck them behind your belt, drag them around on a dog leash, use them as a plate and a spoon, etc. etc.. Now then, that's creativity. A system is putting your shoes on your feet -- the left one on the left foot, the right one on the right foot. There's infinitely many ways "civilized" people are "creatively" discombobulated from the get-go, so when they just express themselves freely, they have absolutely nothing to express other than shades and flavors and degrees of this discombobulated state. One can engage in this neurotic behavior and believe oneself a free spirit, an artist, a part of nature (duh... raised by the TV and video games, nature's native son...). Or one can get lucky and stumble across a system that will start undoing the damage and unfolding the true potentials of natural normalcy. But to get this lucky, one must first get humble and understand that the source of much of his or her self-expression is ignorance of an extreme kind, all-encompassing, body, mind, spirit. Without such realization people tend to instinctively avoid systems that can potentially threaten their inflated self-image by sticking their noses smack into their glaring incompetence in pretty much everything that a "human being" is about.

Breath is interesting, and unique, in that it has double controls explicitly built in -- both in the upper brain and lower brain, conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary. Which is why so many practices "work" with breath in the beginning -- you learn to be able to choose which system to use, the boss mode -- "I control this" or the autopilot mode -- "it/something/don't know who or what controls it." But this is one of the fundamental skills I've been talking about earlier that is, down the road, applicable to everything else, every other function, after you've mastered this one. You learn how to create voluntary control centers for heart rate, blood pressure, liver functions, kidneys functions, all that originally involuntary jazz. What you will apply the skill to becomes a choice. To modulating the physical or exploring the nonphysical, or both? The moment you come across a new and different practice, you think, hmm, I can try this, and I don't have to start from scratch, I know some basics that are applicable... And if the new practice is incompatible with what you've been doing before, you'll know that too, often right away -- you don't experiment blindly anymore, you "see" into what this or that mode is about and can predict what it's going to do to you if you take it on board, something good or something atrocious. I do a special seasonal meditation, winter only, for a certain personal modification. It is different from my regular practice, and does not require absolute stillness, sitting in lotus, or reverse breathing. But since I know all these fundamentals are not even remotely incompatible with my Water meditation, I incorporate them with impunity. Just to get an additional benefit, which I know is a benefit, not a transgression. Will it affect my main practice adversely? No. Will my main practice get enriched if I give a special boost to an individual "qi phase need" that is mine specifically, not "universal?" That's quite possible. But if someone else wants to learn this from me, they better know WHY they need it. Chances are they don't, and doing it is going to do damage. So, again and again: get the fundamentals, and applications are your oyster.

Most traditional taoist training always included exposure to other systems. Taoism is not to be confused with modalities we are more closely familiar with, ones that discourage contact with slightly, let alone massively, different modalities, seeing them as competition at best, as inferior or "wrong" obligatorily, and as the enemy often enough. A Protestant priest may be frowned upon by his congregation (at the very least) if he routinely goes to Catholic confession, and you can't even enter a mosque if you are not Muslim, so some Westerners extend this habitual state of their spiritual affairs to taoism. A Western scientist will be disqualified if he engages in alchemy (although Isaac Newton's example should have taught them that this can be quite scientifically fruitful), but a taoist alchemist is not precluded from studying Western science. As Dawei mentioned quoting the great Sima Qian, taoists "exemplify the best of every school by assimilating any teaching." My own teachers had several teachers of their own, are spectacularly well-educated and skillful in many endeavors, and do not object to explorations. To do otherwise is only justified when the goal is to recruit to a cult and have the followers adhere to the ironclad party line or else be accused of thought-crime and disowned or punished. Our religious institutions and our scientific ones alike (the latter having been modeled on the former) may be such cults, but taoism is not.

It doesn't matter if you practice one system or fifteen. What matters is if you get the fundamentals. You can apply them to perfecting one art, but if the practice is a fundamental one, it doesn't matter -- the skill is applicable to fifteen others, or more. Just yesterday my taiji teacher was drilling me in directing qi to the hands. This was for taiji, but what would stop me from using this skill for calligraphy? Paining? Healing? Talismanic sorcery? Cooking? Knitting? Stuffing demons in a gourd bottle?.. There's fundamental practices and fundamental skills. A fundamental practice is what you may want to give the bulk of your time and dedication. Fundamental skills, however, gained from such practice, can be applied to any other practice you fancy. If you can breathe abdominally, you can reverse breathe abdominally. If you can visualize, you can blank out the screen. If you can open your heart, you can open your joints. If you can open your joints, you can open your meridians. If you can heal yourself, you can heal someone else. If you find that you can't master a fundamental skill doing whatever your current practice is, change the practice. As a potential future immortal from Chen village told us at a workshop, "You don't serve taiji. Taiji serves you." I am no slave to any practice. I do what I love. If love is not there, I won't do it. If I love more than one, I'll do all of them -- provided I don't love being lazy and slacking even more. My heart decides.

All wet procedures are actually contraindicated with a common cold, in many traditions. Heating is good but it's got to be dry heat. Some remedies include dry mustard powder in wool socks overnight, heated up salt pack on the chest (you could put the salt in a sock too for the purpose, after frying it up in a pan -- don't use a microwave), a hot hard-boiled egg to the sinuses (wrapped in, um, a sock again), stuff like that. Many colds can be zapped within hours with a gram of vitamin C every hour (sic -- a gram every hour, not lower than that and not higher in one portion. And a good brand is essential -- synthetic is nowhere near as efficient as natural ascorbic acid, derived from food sources but not from corn at that.) Colloidal silver in massive amounts, in high concentrations -- 500ppm minimum (don't bother with the 10ppm scam sold at most HFSs). The healing sound for the Lungs qigong -- VERY helpful. Another important thing -- stay warm at all times, don't underdress, don't expose any bare body parts to the air. If you must be outside, dress up as a cabbage, don't overlook the scarf, the hat, warm socks. But it's better to stay inside, and warm. If you get rid of it within 24 hours, remember what you did and use it the next time around. If you don't, change your protocol. A good protocol eliminates it fast if applied right away -- the longer you wait before you start the treatment, the longer you will have to wait for it to go away. The first day is crucial -- every hour corresponds to a day -- i.e. start in the first hour and you'll be done in one day, start in the second, in two, etc..

If you really mean one clove rather than one bulb, you must have some mean garlic down under! I use 2 cups of water over a whole bulb, not one clove but, like, a dozen, peeled and crushed. You pour boiling water over it, bring back to a boil and cook it for 2-3 minutes, then steep, covered, for another 15. Despite a massive amount of garlic, this takes the bite out of it and it's indeed surprisingly decent-tasting. This is a true remedy, not symptomatic but a strong antiviral/bactericide with a particular affinity to the Lungs. This helps not just with a common cold but even with the flu, bronchitis, pneumonia, though the dose would have to be higher -- 4 cups daily.

Taoist and buddhist sorcerers, e.g.. A friend of mine told me about the street of sorcerers he once visited in rural Hong Kong. They like to specialize locally in South East Asia -- I've seen it myself in China -- there can be a street of mattress makers, a street of computer repairmen, and this one is a street of curses and hexes. Sorcerers sit outside in the street and place tools of their trade in front of them -- mostly little tables with calligraphy paraphernalia. The clients come, many of them -- crowds -- and tell the sorcerer they picked the name of the person they want to curse. The sorcerer writes it into an anti-talisman of sorts, then the client takes off his or her shoe, throws the anti-talisman on the ground, and pummels the piece of paper with the shoe, screaming and yelling and cursing and fuming and fretting. The beatings go on till the accursed name disintegrates. I'm told the whole street is pandemonium. I'd love to see it someday...

About metta, I don't know. Sales people in stores who have to say "have a nice day" hundreds of times a day, every day -- do they accomplish anything? I'm not saying no, I don't know. Personally, I haven't noticed any bright auras around them in excess of what you can see around people in different occupations. And I'm not sure my own days when I do shopping are any nicer than those when I don't. The healing sounds (not Chia's -- he's one of the picker-uppers, not "the" source... they are traditional and ancient) are different. They resonate with the actual sounds emitted by the organs, though only a trained or natural ear can hear them as sounds that can be verbalized, but the "vibe" is authentic. I've heard my Kidneys emit the Kidneys sound many times (with my ear against a pillow... and Kidneys are easier to hear than other organs because their meridians open into the ears.) And the cat hissing in anger emits the Liver sound (anger is stored in the Liver...) And so on. So, when you work with what's real, it's not photoshop. I remember a scary story on the news, long ago. There was a young woman with a newborn baby who had been raised in a strict religious family, don't remember which religion. She was prohibited from ever saying a "bad" word, she was never allowed to express "negativity," she was supposed to be respectful and pious and praise the lord and honor her parents, stuff like that. Her dad called on the phone. (Landline times, not a cell phone.) When the phone rang, the baby started crying. She picked up the phone with one hand, the baby, with another. "Yes, father. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, the baby is crying. No, sir, I can't make him stop. Yes, I know it's my fault. Thank you, father. Yes, I can try." And she started hitting the baby with the phone receiver, and was at it until she killed him. "All right, father, I made him stop crying, just as you told me to." So, I remembered this story because it illustrates, in a more extreme fashion but not dissimilar to many others, why I believe that superficial expressions of "being good" can effectively stifle all expressions of "being real" -- and that's dangerous, because real stuff that goes unexpressed builds up tremendous pressure under the lid and sooner or later either implodes (destroying one from the inside) or explodes (destroying whoever is around). It's not good to be angry and frustrated and miserable -- but pretending you are not when you are, refusing to own your own feelings (and, in relation to others, often refusing to own one's own behavior -- e.g. expressing anger with body language but faulting others for noticing, and promptly projecting it -- "you are angry!" Oh fuck... Yes, now I am! ) -- that's worse than occasionally losing one's temper and saying a "bad" word or crying or yelling in sheer frustration, under stress, under pressure, under reality. The pious, righteous types scare me, more often than not... The robotic unfeeling ones, more so...

Holler!

Hi Arktos, welcome to the forum (if you're new rather than reincarnated) Cool about the sufi parallel! I do suspect they share some original sources with "my people." As for the details, yes, that's how a great teacher teaches in my experience -- with much focus on subtle and not-so-subtle technicalities and without top-heavy metaphysics. Whatever comes as the outcome of grasping the technique and the idea is left to the student to process, interpret, marvel at or get further instructed by from within. Tao is in the details... As for your "relying on intuition and personal resonance," what you describe seems very right on to me, but precisely because it is subjective "interpretations" rather than objective "techniques," it would be difficult to get someone else to learn. I try to deliberately avoid poetic expressions when talking about these things (and so do my teachers) though poetry is indeed, invariably, what floods your consciousness when a practice goes well -- it makes your soul eloquent, so when you do want to express what your alchemy has distilled, you go to metaphor, to allegory, to the magnificent "stylistics" of reality rather than its raw underpinnings and ball bearings. When it's fully operational, there's infinitely many ways to describe it. But when one is learning how to get it to work, it's more like, flip this switch, don't touch that button, nevermind the flickering screen, pay attention to this-here indicator... stuff like that.

double