Taomeow

Boo hoo. Now onward to stranger things. What I find strange -- always -- is the universal response of the masses to being treated like manipulable morons, which boils down to, "if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy." Not that I ever get my coffee from Starbucks, but if I ever did, I would boycott them now. I will boycott whoever follows suit. Don't know how long I'll still be able to procure basic necessities, but I'll hold out for as long as I can.

Far as I remember (from personal interactions -- and that was quite a while ago so I don't remember all the details), master Wang Liping was conducting his own investigation into differences in the location of various qi junctures and gates ("energy centers") based on geographic location and anatomical peculiarities of practitioners from different places. In particular, I remember a conversation about the upper dantien and the distance from the surface to the "mud ball" or niwan -- he was interested in whether it's different in the Chinese vs. Westerners due to the difference in the shape of the bridge of the nose and the area between the eyebrows. As for geographical explorations of these phenomena, he even traveled to the North Pole to conduct his investigations!

Both are words that gain meanings only in context. The size of genome that is addressed in the OP (larger vs smaller) presupposes greater complexity -- much like The Iliad possesses greater complexity than a tweet. Whether The Iliad is redundant compared to a tweet... depends on who you ask. Ask among the tweeting generation and it's highly likely you'll get an answer in the affirmative. So?.. To make such a statement, you would have to get a very good handle on what a genome is and what complexity is -- not just in the colloquial sense -- tackle it as a term from complexity theory which presupposes a working understanding of linear and nonlinear algebra, graph theory, probability theory, basic abstract algebra (groups, rings, and fields), basic logic and fuzzy logic -- for starters. I've seen geneticists and mathematicians alike in absolute awe of plant complexity, and yet you used the OP's humble word "complex" as a platform for debunking... what exactly? That plants may possess the kind of complexity which the johnny-come-lately organ of a new and experimental animal species, the neocortex, might still have a hard time comprehending?.. 700 million years of evolutionary success can only be debunked by a matching/exceeding feat. So, let's talk about it again in 700 million years.

Just like that old joke about a psychiatrist giving a patient the Rorschach test: "Ugh! Shame on you, doctor! What kind of pervert are you, keeping this kind of dirty pictures in your office?!"

Stranger things have happened.

This picture is wrong too. I'm nowhere near a brunette and I never wear below-knee shorts. Also, I hardly ever discuss non-dualism.

On the surface of the body, the LDT corresponds to the 氣海 REN 6 (Qihai) or Sea of Qi acupoint, which is located 1.5 body units (cun) below the navel. Cun is one's personal unit of measurement -- all bodies are different but all bodies are fractals, so your cun may be different from mine, but you can easily determine yours. Most "average" bodies will have approximately similar average cun values but someone short or taller than "average" (whatever that means) might do better not relying on inches or centimeters offered by various "approximators" and finding the actual point on his or her actual body. Precision matters more in acupuncture of course, dantiens don't need to be located within millimeters, so a rough idea of where your very own "1.5 cun below the navel" is should suffice. At the back of the body, 命門 Du 4 Mingmen or Gate of Life point is located exactly opposite your LDT. Of course neither one is merely a point on the surface, it's more like a vortex connecting the two.

@Unota Your username sounded kind of Japanese to me, so I googled... well, I was close. There's a Japanese name Unita, which has a whole wealth of meanings apparently: 宇仁田- Unita - 宇 means "space, universe." Roof, House - A roof or house, representing a home and shelter. Universe - The universe, representing the world and all that is in it. Spirit, Intelligence - Spirit or intelligence, representing a person's capacity for thought and understanding. 仁 means "humanity, benevolence, kindness." Compassion - Showing kindness and sympathy towards others. Affection - Showing fondness and love towards others. Humanity - Showing kindness and understanding towards others. Person - An individual human being. Fruit - The seed of a fruit. 田 means "rice field, rice paddy." Field - A general term for cultivated land. Tillage - To cultivate the land. Place of Production - A metaphor for a place that produces something. Countryside - A rural area. Hunting - To hunt or go hunting. As for me, I am a taoist and I like to meow. I meow in many situations where normally people would go "wow" or "ouch" or "ah" -- in other words, meow is my placeholder for any emotion that warrants a brief in-the-moment expression. I was Taomeow online before TDB existed, and never changed that username, although over the years it's grown a bit too cute for my current age and my anti-cute cultural preferences. But I don't give a flying through a rolling.

Yes, I remember her too...

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When I was in high school, I've been to a tour of a mayonnaise factory. If I can't find a picture of the mayonnaise factory, may I show you a picture of my high school?

Youtube keeps flooding my feed with "recommended for me" videos according to some algorithm or other which I find a bit disturbing. After I watch a tutorial on, e.g., cleaning a shearling jacket, my feed overflows with videos trying to teach me how to clean everything, from a live sheep to a rural Japanese house. If, after a Mandarin Chinese lesson, I want to see what yesterday's flood in Turkey looked like, the powerful but mysterious mind behind profiling the viewer inundates me with suggestions to learn Turkish, a decade's worth of videos on assorted disasters all over the world, videos promising to teach me Russian from scratch in just one month, and a Thanksgiving turkey recipe. Latest installment: a documentary about the superb intelligence of cuttlefish, right next to a crunchy cuttlefish pancakes lesson. That pairing in my feed was not enough to make a vegetarian out of me but just for this morning I had to change my breakfast plan (which was cassava flour pancakes) so as to give myself some time to process the trauma. I think the worst part is, people's minds today seem to be conditioned, more and more, in this schizophrenic fashion -- random associations latching onto this or that key word or image instead of... well... whatever human minds were like before all this technological conditioning.

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The Sumerian creation myth, discovered on a tablet in Nippur, an ancient Mesopotamian city founded in approximately 5000 BC, begins like this: When in the height heaven was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, And the primeval Apsu, who begat them, And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both Their waters were mingled together, And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen; When of the gods none had been called into being, And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained; Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven... Around 5400 BCE, settlers arriving from no one knows where, speaking a language that was a linguistic isolate (not related to any other known languages), which also happens to be the oldest known written language on earth, founded Eridu, a city in southern Mesopotamia (on the territory of present-day Iraq) which is generally regarded by today's historians to have been the world’s first city. It didn't appear to gradually change from something primitively city-like to a full blown city -- on the contrary, from the get-go it had absolutely everything we associate with an ancient city: temples, administrative buildings, housing, agriculture, markets, astronomy and mathematics and art, and, of course, walls. The Sumerian people were also an ethnic isolate, and intermixed with other populations of the area only a couple thousand years later, after Akkadian conquests which ultimately created a "melting pot." Sumerians and Akkadians, though they did continue to live in the same cities but in their own distinct communities, both referred to themselves as the sag gigga (“black-headed people”) and didn't have a concept of race, nor any prohibitions on intermarriage. Which seems to have gradually become common enough to eventually erase all traces of Sumerian-proper DNA from the human genetic pool -- at least none can be clearly identified at present. No one knows what they looked like either, since their surviving art is so eclectic and presented so many human and non-human versions of their self-portraits that it's of no help. It is not known if the term sag gigga, "black-headed," refers to hair color at all, since they also had a term for the "uncivilized" peoples surrounding them that literally means "red-faced," much like what European settlers dubbed Native Americans, referring not so much to the actual skin color (which was never really "red") but to the -- well, everybody knows what. "Black-headed" may have been a reference not to the appearance but, e.g., to the custom of wearing a hat (or some other head covering) for sun protection common in those who didn't live in a forest; while "red-faced" distinguished those who did still live in the forest, and therefore didn't need sun-protection contraptions. All that is known (from multiple clay tablets with extensive accounts of everything under Sumerian sun) about the relationship between the black-headed and the red-faced is that the black-headed did not discriminate against other black-headed, i.e. they accepted anyone civilized as equal, and simultaneously hated, rejected, and relentlessly killed all "red-faced," "wild," non-civilized people around their cities. The raids to exterminate the "uncivilized" were a regular and common feature of the civilized lifestyle of the area for thousands of years. And so begins the thread aiming to tackle Sumer without any references to Sitchin and staying only with the "accepted" "orthodox" "mainstream" etc. sources -- in an attempt to figure out if an overview of those "legitimized" sources might be sufficient to draw any non-legitimized conclusions about what the original creators of our present lifestyle were really up to -- before trying to jump to any conclusions regarding who they were.

Here it is.

If it was a simple matter of voting for or against, I'd vote no. A mere thread in the General section would suffice. A few years ago I got interested in the Sumerian origins of, not just Abrahamic religions but a helluva lot of Indo-European civilization, and started a thread on the subject, which was plenty enough. (For anyone interested, it's still there.) Considering it is far less likely to cause tensions and inflame passions today due to Sumerians themselves having disappeared, unlike an Abrahamic discussion which would be populated by individuals exposed in real life, one way or the other, to the irreconcilable differences between these three major branches of the Abrahamic tradition, methinks dedicating a thread or three to them, for those interested, would work better.

Erwin Schrödinger trying to convince his cat to participate in the experiment

According to the British birth registration data, in 2021, Muhammad was the most popular baby boys' name in four out of nine English regions. An Islamic forum anyone?.. No takers?.. You aren't thinking of your future.

Yes!! And AFAIK it would be the ultimate insult to the dead lineage teacher to change the practice to suit one's own ambitions and/or limitations and/or the current market and still claim lineage art. I've seen too many examples of this kind of un-gratitude. (A digression. One exception would be someone who is not just a lineage practitioner but also a direct descendant by blood -- son or daughter of the teacher. They are the only ones who can change the practice and still claim lineage. Interestingly enough, such occurrences are exceptionally rare. In my taiji lineage, e.g., I'm only aware of one such case, and even in that case, the practice was changed because the guy believed he uprooted an older version of the same lineage -- but called it "new" none the less, since he was changing the version that was originally inherited by him. And someone who did invent his own, quite different version of the practice didn't keep the name of the lineage, giving it his own name instead. Which was the decent thing to do.)

Bennett is the translator. The author is Lermontov. There's several translations of this (famous in Russian) poem into English in existence, I was just looking for the one "more literal," i.e. closest to the original. All of them lose the music (it's hard to sing like Placido Domingo if you're not at least Pavarotti) but now I see the one I quoted also loses the mood... and that's how tongue-in-cheek humor could occur to the reader. The original follows the Romanticism tradition and is heart-wrenchingly tragic -- the protagonist (actually a self-portrait of the author) is this stiff-upper-lipped sufferer who is "grateful" out of pride and restraint -- as an antidote to lamenting and complaining. Your idea about "The Spiritual Force of Refusing to Deny the Suckiness of Sucky Things" thread is excellent. As synchronicity would have it I just finished a Norwegian novel whose female protagonist is grateful for everything she has, all the time -- and it starts out on such happy uplifting notes that you can't but admire and even envy her. And then things gradually start turning darker and darker -- but the main protagonist won't budge, she's determined to remain happy and grateful no matter what. And eventually it starts translating into a peculiar lack of empathy for those who don't feel the way she does. She just can't relate to situations where someone, in order not to disown her own feelings (and ultimately her own reality) should be cursing one's fate instead of being grateful. Even if this someone is herself.

Mikhail Lermontov, one of the greatest Russian poets, wrote this poem in 1840, at the age of 25. He was killed in a duel a year later. GRATITUDE For everything, for everything I thank thee: For hidden passions' pain that never ends, For bitter tears, a poison kiss to taint me, For vengeful foes and fickle, sland'ring friends; For fire of my soul in deserts wasted, For all conniving ways life's done me wrong... Aplenty of this cup thy servant's tasted… Please grant I’ll not be thanking thee for long. Translation Copyright ©2017 David Mark Bennett

Like I said, he was (IMO) "taoist material." "And I lift my glass to the Awful Truth Which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth Except to say it isn't worth a dime And the whole damn place goes crazy twice And it's once for the devil and once for Christ But the Boss don't like these dizzy heights We're busted in the blinding lights Of Closing Time..." I think I could write a whole "commentary," in the style of, e.g., interpretations of Zhuangzi, to this passage (as well as quite a few others) to flesh out my point. But between taoism and zen, as another poet put it on another occasion, "falls the Shadow..."

Raised in Orthodox Judaism, ordained as a Zen monk, with interest in Christianity, Gnosticism, and Hindu philosophy. I think "anything goes as long as it's not taoism" would describe his beliefs best ...most probably due to lack of exposure, he may have been "taoist material" but it's a narrow path and not many stumble upon it.

Nice story. And you were not wrong. There's blessings in both modes, especially for those who are good at viewing whatever is going on in their lives as a blessing. In any event, either mode can also be a mixed blessing. Being grateful "for" something could be an endless litany... E.g., orthodox Judaism has a daily gratitude prayer where god is thanked, among other things, "for not making me a woman." Obviously only half of all believers can possibly be grateful for that, but for the ones that are it's a gift that keeps giving. In a similar vein, someone who has two legs could be grateful "for" not having only one, and someone with this or that skin color, for not being a different color, and someone who has a brother, for not being saddled with a sister instead, and if the brother is older, why not express gratitude for his not being your younger brother (thus reserving the "spoiled little brat" spot for you rather than taking it for himself) and so on. Grateful for being whatever nationality -- e.g. Hungarian -- or for not being Hungarian (one look at a random word from that language and gratitude overflows -- e.g. Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért, and yes it is a word). As a Chinese proverb goes, one walks knee deep in Buddhas, there's always something to be grateful "for." I guess I more readily relate to being grateful "to" a human or an animal -- for what they do or for what they are.

Happy Thanksgiving to you! To me, gratitude means quite a bit more when it's expressed in actions. Thoughts, feelings, words that don't translate into doing something good for whoever one is grateful to... (or at least not doing anything bad against them...) ...not so much. I had a best friend. We had a falling out. Then, after a very long time, something happened that prompted her to reestablish the contact, and she told me she has always been and will always be grateful for what I've done for her and her family. Which by the way wasn't a small thing, or a one-time thing -- I completely changed her life for massively better (and yet I didn't feel particularly "entitled" to any gratitude because it was, as they say, "straight from the heart," and mutual, and I could thank her similarly for what she had done for me.) While the break-up and the loss of a best friend was painful for both of us and took a while to adjust to, after her belated verbal acknowledgement, frankly, I felt nothing in particular. So she's grateful. So how did it help me in any of the times of need while our lives took their separate courses, or alternatively, how did it enhance my joy when she wasn't sharing it with me? Gratitude seems to have an expiration date, and adding preservatives (in the form of any which imposed structure) might extend its shelf life... but I feel it means infinitely more when expressed in action at the time felt. So most of the time I neither dispense nor consume canned or stale gratitude... except out of politeness of course, which is not exactly the same as "straight from the heart."