Taomeow

It's only science if you know that whoever paid for the study didn't stand to lose or gain profits from its outcome. Been a while since the last time life sciences were not an oxymoron. Social engineering ain't science. And we've they've been manufacturing social engineering and calling it scientific studies for quite some time now. I knew a scientist, a world class geneticist and the pioneering researcher and foremost authority on one particular fascinating subject (lectinology). He was asked to study GM potatoes. He did. The outcome was, they are hazardous to health. He presented the outcome of the study as is -- hazardous, mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic. He was immediately fired, dragged through mud, blacklisted, and replaced with another scientist who promptly announced that GM potatoes are perfectly safe. Just sayin'...

Now we all confused. I was a shiny snowflake. Now we snow... a mess!

You are very welcome, and your outcome is brilliantly reflective or your cognitive effort.

Not Taoist. Chiaist.

I don't know how they design their studies but I have a bit of an idea as to what they may have been asked to prove by those who pay for them. For one thing, a rift between sexes is not wide enough for the destroyers of families and social harmonies on any and all levels, so whatever can be used to widen it, will be used. Doesn't have to be true, only has to do the job. For another, it's much easier to mind-fuck someone proud or ashamed than someone happy, which is why there's no shortage of studies proving that happiness is an abnormal state. I've seen a PDR entry that lists "feelings of happiness" as a symptom of a mental disorder. This is ingrained in the social psyche. When I feel happy, I've learned to keep it to myself. Whenever I told even close friends that I felt happy, they were concerned. As Paul Simon once sang, "I should be depressed, My life is a mess, But I'm having a good time..." -- not acceptable! Who's gonna take antidepressants if everybody starts having a good time?.. It's trillions in endangered profits we're talking, man, trillions!

Here's an example from my childhood (which usually contains answers to everything for everybody): Humbling -- jumping across a wide ditch at a construction site, expecting to fly like an eagle and winding up on the bottom instead, with a three-inch-long, inch-deep cut on my leg from a metal rod that happened to have been sticking out of the side of the ditch. Humiliating -- if I did it for show rather than for fun, it would have been. But I didn't and so it wasn't. Ashamed -- if I did what was humiliating and realized it was my own fault. It was not my fault that I was inexperienced in judging distances, and it was not humiliating because I didn't do it to impress anyone, so ashamed, I wasn't either. So, that was a pure humbling experience, no contaminations.

Sure. 1. It's not a definition, it's a description of a side effect of a particular practice. The source of this description is this practice. 2. The goal depends on your motivation for cultivation. E.g., getting rid of the "ego" is the goal of some practices in some traditions. It is not the goal of my practice in my tradition, but it can be a "side effect." Much like increased flexibility is a side effect of practicing yoga even if you practice it toward a different goal altogether. 3. I call it "dissolution" because this word points toward the actual subjectively perceived dynamics of what you are experiencing. If the dynamics were different, I'd call it "going up in flames" or "dropping like a dead fly" or "tumbling down with a mighty roar" or some such. But it feels like melting ice, like a spoonful of sugar in a cup of hot tea, hence the term "dissolution."

OK, let's try this by increments. You don't need to focus on any sensations, you are moving your awareness, not your extraocular muscles or the ciliary of any such physical organ. On the contrary, what you want to do is take your awareness away from any sensations in your eyes or your nose, and look with your awareness, not with your physical organs. Awareness is mobile independently of physical organs, but the habit of tying it down to what your physical organs can perceive is strong, so learning to turn it around requires practice. It's not a physical practice, it's a form of meditation. Let's start with your proving to yourself that your awareness is mobile independently of the physical motions and sensations in your eyes. Place two objects in front of you, next to each other -- say, an apple and an orange, touching each other, so close that you don't have to move your eyes to see one and then the other -- in the spot they are touching in any event, you can see both with single focus. Don't move your eyes but focus your awareness on the apple, to the exclusion of the orange. Observe its color, shape, texture, think of its taste, remember the mythology of Eve getting one from the serpent, become aware of all things apple in all its incarnations and manifestations. What happened to the orange while you were doing this? You didn't move your eyes but you took your awareness away from it. Now take your awareness onto the orange instead. Do the same thing as you did with the apple. What happened to the apple while you were at it? It disappeared, right? Not from your sight, but from your awareness. You can move your awareness from one to the other without involvement of any physical perceptions. It is mobile. Now replace the fruit with a mug that has a handle and place it in front of you so that you can see the handle. You see it with your eyes and your awareness alike. Now turn it so your eyes can't see the handle. Without moving your eyes, move your awareness to where you would have to look from so as to still see the handle. Close your eyes and move your awareness to where you can see the handle from. Open your eyes but don't change the place where you placed your awareness so as to look at the handle from there. It is a spot that has mobility, though it has no physical existence. You can also give it stability, but that's the next exercise. First let me know if you can do what I described -- but don't do it while typing, focus your awareness (not your eyes...)

A spot on the wall -- no, don't go deeper. Turn around. I'll elaborate. In order to do this, you become aware of your perceptions first -- say, vision. You are looking from somewhere toward or at or onto somewhere else. (You are not looking at your looking eyes, see?) So, first become aware of where you're looking from. And then look from elsewhere. Don't get radical all at once -- look from somewhere close to the habitual place. Don't look from your eyes, look from, e.g., the tip of your nose. Practice that for a while. Then move on -- that point on the tip of your nose, you can move it an inch forward and away from your nose, and look from there. And then move it a foot away. From a foot away, you can look back at the tip of your nose. That's turning the sight around. A spot on the wall? Change places between where you're looking from and where you're looking at. Look from that spot on the wall onto yourself. The same technique can be applied to each and every one of your senses, perceptions and functions. You breathe? Now turn it around and let it breathe you. When you turn around all of your senses simultaneously in this manner -- that's what turning the light of awareness around means. This is a technique for "dissolution of self," incidentally, which is a side effect, not the goal. A self is only a technique in and of itself, and becomes a problem only when it locks one in a habitual awareness rut where the technique of "self" takes up far more space than it deserves. If it doesn't, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with having it. If you can change your awareness from the POV of "self" to any other chosen one with completeness and ease, "self" becomes just one POV out of many available to you (infinitely many for that matter) and, as such, not such a big deal anymore. No need to keep trying to fight it off when it knows its place.

Cool... but the real prime real estate up there... that would be Aldebaran, the royal star, the light and inspiration for the Pleiades! The brain of the Bull, the tail of Orion's sash, the... well, I can talk incessantly about it but better drop by someday and check it out for yourself. And sometimes I go back here:

There's Five Phases of Qi ("five elements" to a non-student of Chinese astrology, or a student of "popularized" versions) -- wuxing -- that comprise everything in the manifest world. Live things are normally put together out of all five, which accounts for the ability of life to replicate and perpetuate itself -- they are a cycle, generating each other as they go, so live things emulate that. The cycle starts faltering if one of the phases is deficient or is altogether missing -- this is correctable with knowledge of bazi that allows one to introduce the missing/deficient phase from the outside world, to consciously bring in the qi of a particular nature and quality. Two phases missing -- same thing, though it becomes more difficult, but all the more necessary. I have never seen a chart with three phases missing (and I've done hundreds over the years). I would be curious to take a quick look at yours, since if you say three phases are missing from your Pillars, you are unique in my personal bazi experience, and I would like to ponder. Now "elementals" (for lack of a better term) are not as complex as live creatures, they are put together out of just one "element" or rather phase of qi, not five. This explains the difficulty communicating with these entities -- they are fully functional in a much more narrow band of qi than humans, and if they are pulled into the world of manifestations where we normally dwell, they need very careful handling or they become disoriented, overwhelmed, and occasionally violent, or otherwise unwell. Finding territory to meet with them is in the realm of esoteric knowledge, it is doable but it's not a good idea for amateurs to attempt. The ones who have two phases are more stable, and can exist in our dimensions, though they are not AS stable here as creatures of a more comprehensive qi bandwidth. Which may account for all those stories about "the true face," an alien face, suddenly becoming visible from behind the face of a publicly known figure which we hear so many of and believe so reluctantly or not at all. They are not tall tales though, I've seen that transformation myself, many times, but I have to use some focusing tricks to be able to see, and I seldom do it because it is often (though not always) very unpleasant. (In a recently posted thread about Iceland, as synchronicity would have it, one woman who asserts she can see elves and such mentioned that she has to do a particular thing with her eyes in order to be able to see them, sort of draw them back into her head and change the focus. I do something else, but the idea is similar -- you don't look at these things with the same human eyes that you see through in the human world.) So, aliens of some varieties are not necessarily from other planets, they are from other wuxing bandwidth, so to speak, and are "alien" or "hybrid" inasmuch as they differ from the "standard" human composition, which entails five phases or close to that. They may not be deficient at all in their powers, in fact they can have powers exceeding those of a balanced human, but their powers are invariably one-sided (or, sometimes, two-sided). And, again, this limitation is not necessarily "bad" -- a spirit of Fire can't do the cooling-off of anything inflamed ("in flames"), but it may be very "good" in a world that's freezing, though not as versatile as a human who can do both hot and cold stuff. A spirit of Fire can't water a plant, but unless he clears some debris and renews the soil, neither can the spirit of Water. So, their larger function in the world is not "good" or "bad" -- just different from that of animated entities with complex (and occasionally self-contradictory) souls. Locally though it can be "good" or "bad," and "local" may mean the whole span of a civilization's existence. We can wind up with a "bad" one if those are in charge of our world who don't really belong.

I'll PM a bit later, gotta run.

A 4Pillars chart would reveal it. E.g. Prince Charles's has only two phases, Fire and Water. That's not human. I have seen one chart with TWO phases missing on this forum. That's a hybrid. Haven't seen a semisynthetic elemental or a pure alien though.

For Putin too.

And in San Diego.

Sumbeki said: When I was a spirit reader for a large tribe living in a mountain valley, one of my duties was to match future husbands and wives at birth. The parents came to me with the infant. I would examine the infant for all possible markings on the body, read the palms and soles of the feet, the head, face and back. Then I would inquire about the exact time of birth and do my calculations. Then I would tell the parents what kind of a name to give the infant so as to strengthen or balance out his or her vital forces. The name would be bringing in the energy required for proper development every time it was called. Then I would tell the parents what the baby's personality and destiny would be if they do this and that, don't do this and that. Then I would tell them which families with young children to approach to make marriage arrangements for the newborn. If no small children were born yet who could be a perfect match, I would tell them to either wait for a while, hoping the perfect future spouse for their child would be born to our tribe eventually, or alternatively, to take a trip across the mountain range to the neighboring tribe's settlements and take the baby's natal chart with all my notations to that tribe's spirit reader, who would then look for a match among their people. I gave a 100% guarantee, and the law was that if a marriage I told the parents to pre-arrange won't be happy or won't bring in strong and healthy children, I would pay all affected parties a sizable fine. I never had to pay that fine. Mine was by far the wealthiest family in the valley, so I could always help out if another tribesman's herd got lost in the snowstorm or if anyone who neglected to honor the ancestors or offended the gods fell on hard times. It was a wonderful job. I held it for close to a hundred years, that's why I remember, it was very repetitive, my duties never varied and I kept perfecting the same set of skills for nearly a century. When I finally retired, I went to the mountains to live as a hermit.

Of course. Take a stroll in an area with tall buildings that have waterspouts several stories high. As you casually walk by, give each of those waterspouts a hefty kick. (It's up to you to figure out how to do it so as not to attract unwanted attention. When I used to do it, I was 7 or 8 and the plan was to run away as fast as possible if anyone notices and starts making waves.) Use your aikido skills and withdraw your kicking leg promptly, for two reasons -- so as passers-by don't have a chance to notice that you kicked the waterspout, and so that your leg doesn't get in the way of what happens next. What happens next should be thunderous rumbling, and sizable cylinders of ice falling out of the waterspout. (Of course the ideal conditions would have been a mix of rain and snow before the freeze-over -- if it never snowed or rained, I guess it might not work...) If you get very lucky, you will replicate what happened to me once, on the way home from school. Usually you got just the part of the inner ice core of the waterspout stuck in the curvy lowermost segment, but once, a good kick caused this thunder to start going up and up, all the way to the roof, to the sky! And then five stories of vertical ice thundered down, crumbling as it went and forming a mountain of ice rubble to the side of the opening easily six feet high! And the speed of it all happening was much faster than a free-fall would be because, well, ice is slippery, and once it got dislodged, it accelerated to an uncanny velocity! And it roared as it went down! And no one suspected that a skinny 8-year-old girl whom they didn't even notice was behind what made them jump and then gape and gawk and marvel! Oh, what a moment in time!

Those who struggle with the concept or (too often) think that wuwei means "doing nothing" or "not interfering in any way" or "just allowing whatever happens to happen" should watch this -- the people in the video exemplify the true meaning of wuwei IMO. (A fellow bum sent me the link who hasn't posted in a while -- when he used to, he was rather wuwei too! ;-) ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfBxgw6AODM

Does either of you have a site where your work can be viewed?

I'm not sure they're lizards, I haven't seen a difference in their physical appearance beyond a layer of sticky, sickening evil that makes me shudder (and some politicians actually make me sick, just looking at their faces does -- and "personalities" too, most of them, even those who are supposed to be our ideals of beauty). But "models" of any size -- that's definitely not a human invention.

Oh, and I can't speak for all "normal women," but those I was lucky to know and befriend are only attracted to the man who is interested in more things, and in other things, than himself. So if you are after quantity (to make up for a glaring lack of quality of the feeling experience), anything goes as long as you find a convincing role to play and irresistible moves to deliver... but if you're after quality and the real thing, don't work on your lines -- work on saving the world, or a kitten, or a friend, or... Have something in your life besides yourself that you are really using your true power to help flourish. The real woman who knows how to love will notice. And why on earth would you want to settle for less than what's real?.. You deserve the best, start there -- but do become someone who knows with absolute certainty that he deserves the best, don't fool yourself, look inside... and if what you see is a man who deserves the best, go get it, tiger.

Yes, that too. Way too many things are wrong, have been wrong for unimaginably long, and have gotten exponentially worse, in sexual expression of both genders (and it can ONLY be both, you can't screw up one without the other, and it didn't start with women or men, I think it started with some anti-human forces that are not human, but I digress...) Our society suffers from massive sexual dysfunction, is one thing that is clear as day. Massive. It's like that old joke about the camel -- when they asked him, why is your back crooked? -- "and which part of me is straight?" was the response.

TAO Drummers of Japan