Taomeow

Here's from my experience. Was hiking locally (Santa Ana mountains) with a friend, and when we were on top of wherever it was we climbed, it rained, and "down" became slippery. I was pretty unsure of my footing all the while going down, slipping here, sliding there, but then I was completely stuck on a huge boulder, ass bare (the boulder, not me) and pretty much straight up vertical (with a rope anchored into the side). My friend, an experienced mountaineer, climbed down and back up to show me how to do it several times -- no way, I couldn't replicate it. He engaged some other hiker's help and the two of them stood under the boulder and showed me how they would just catch me if I fall. Nope. Couldn't do it. I thought I'd have to spend the rest of my life on that boulder, or shame myself into a helicopter rescue or something. Then another hiker came along, a Japanese guy looking like a ninja. He quickly assessed the situation and told me, "whoa, those slippery sneakers, eh? Take them off!" He took off his own, and the socks too, threw them down, and followed them down barefoot, nimble as a mountain goat. I saw the light then. I took off my sneakers and socks, and it was a different world! I could now climb down and go back up and back down again just for fun, no problem. Feeling stuff is everything.

Years ago I worked in a modality that had nothing to do with taoism but aimed to dismantle one's defense mechanisms to get to the reality behind them for the purpose of healing. Sleep deprivation was used as one possible intervention, though it was not universal -- whatever people used as defenses was taken away from them on an individual basis: the socially active were asked to spend a couple of weeks (or more) in complete isolation and silence (and no TV, books, computer, phone, etc. either), while the ones who habitually kept to themselves and shunned human contact were asked to go out and talk to strangers all day, and so on. There's nothing people can't use as defenses, tools of unreality -- spiritual practices are no exception -- but sleep deprivation cuts to the chase. I'd say it is the single most powerful intervention of them all, and personally I find it rather dangerous based on what I saw, but the context I saw it in was totally different, as well as the goals. I do know a couple of taoist masters who sleep no more than 3 hours on a regular basis, but they are very VERY advanced, and they did go through a "dark night of the soul" before arriving at stellar health. Sooo dark that one has to be very sure one's life circumstances can accommodate a temporary "total eclipse" -- i.e. have enough social support and understanding of the process (and perhaps financial resources to carry one through). A retreat of this nature, undertaken in a traditional monastic setting, comes complete with these prerequisites. Embedded into "ordinary" life -- well, it depends...

Boko-maru, yes! I remember... Vonnegut. Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine...

I wish sunrise was also mine... but at least I often watch the sunset over the ocean. Yesterday, incidentally, it was simply incredible. The video does not do it justice but still I'm grateful for someone actually taking it:

'tis a conditionally nonessential amino acid, meaning it can be manufactured by the human body and does not need to be obtained from the diet, but the body does not produce sufficient amounts, and some arginine must still be consumed in the diet. Many foods have it, animal sources being the richest. It is normally safe to take as a supplement if your diet doesn't have sufficient amounts. If you notice any adverse effects, lower the dose, see what happens. If you don't notice any effects, up the dose, see what happens. It is a good idea to combine it with l-lysine because herpes virus, should you have any dormant, likes l-arginine too and may get activated unless you stop it with l-lysine.

The video is silent, but I grew up with cats and know that this pose (defensive and ready to counterattack) signifies the cat is not just standing her ground but growling and hissing and possibly meowing in a threatening way -- in other words, giving ample warning before responding to the human's attack. One has to be exceedingly ignorant, as the woman in the video obviously is, not to heed the warning. It's like ignoring the cop yelling, "Back down! Back the fuck down!! Show me your hands!! Right meow or I'll shoot!!"

My condolences. The attack you described recently happened to my brother-in-law -- he took their cat to the vet, something the cat hates, and when he got out of the car it turned out that the cat had somehow opened the carrier, and promptly bolted into the nearby bushes. The vet and two nurses, as well as some idle bystanders, surrounded the bushes and tried to assist my brother-in-law in catching the cat, but he was the one who ultimately apprehended him. The cat nearly ate him alive. In the meantime, last month I attempted to capture a cat gone feral, who used to be my cat for three years, the puny, miserable runt of the litter kept out of compassion (no one would want such a skinny weakling of a cat). He was a very gentle cat for three years, not an adventure seeker at all, afraid to go outside, too weak to jump, and so delicate that you could only stroke him with two fingers and he meowed if you used the whole palm, as though you were hurting him. And then one day the wild beast awoke in his heart. He started fighting to the death with his brother (who is twice his size) -- I have never seen on youtube the kind of brutal cat fights I've seen in my own living-room. So I took him to a friend's place, whence he escaped to live in the back yard, a large affair with terraces and plenty of vegetation and hiding places and other cats, so my ex-cat was happy there and decided he didn't trust humans anymore, only coming for his food twice daily. But then my friend's life took a turn that resulted in his need to move and sell the house, so I found another friend willing to take my ex-cat, since abandoning him without any guarantee that the new owners would feed him didn't seem like a good idea. But the cat wouldn't come to people anymore. So to catch him became my quest. I made four separate attempts, and managed to grab him at one point, but he proved stronger. WAY stronger, it was unbelievable. He didn't attack me but he nearly sliced off my thumb with his hind claws pushing away from me. Off he ran, and another week went by, and then my son made the next attempt. Long story short, the two of us managed to finally stuff the cat in the carrier, but my son's hand was bitten through and he had to use his whole weight to wrestle the cat to the ground and pin him down -- and he weighs about 180 lb more than the cat.

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Know synesthesia, the peculiarity some people have of perceiving across sensory systems, e.g. sounds as colors? Nabokov described the colors he saw associated with each sound of a letter of the alphabet, and asserted he inherited this from his mother. I have something else, since childhood, but don't know if it has ever been described and given a Latin name, so I named it myself: morphokinesthesia (from morph, "form, structure, shape" and kinesthesia, sensory perception of motion and position of the body in space.) What some of you are talking about is probably a manifestation -- e.g. Soaring Crane perceiving the letter A as a mountain to climb back and forth, or Stosh seeing quotation marks as footprints of someone else who was there. I have a case of morphokinesthesia that extends to all languages and snippets of languages I know, and finds their unifying features, meanings of the actual real-life changes of shape and motion encoded in letters and sounds of the language. Not just in individual letters and sounds but in their combinations, different positions within words, etc.. This reveals such deep levels of energies embedded in the languages that the process becomes an alchemical extraction, a search for "pure" meanings of "pure" sounds. For instance, T and ST denote a whole bunch of things related to motion, either a cessation or pause of motion or a choice between motion and STillness. T is a Table (and it is visiually), it STands, STable is its feature (has legs but does not walk) and in Russian a table is STol, while a STep is taken by a STupnya (fooT), you can STep or STop, STand, STill, SToop, be STationary like a poST, lamppoST, something S(e)T -- then there's Table as a schedule which is STable and which reflects motion that comes and goes, and a STable for horses is where they are kept when you rather than the horse decides whether it will move or STay puT, and on and on -- I have dozens of T and ST examples. And that's just one example of one discrenible morphokinesthetic configuration. I live in this weird world all the time, sometimes it's mild but sometimes it hiTs me like a Ton of bricks -- STRikes me, but STR is a different morphokinesthetic animal, this one STReams, STRums, it is goverend by TR, the TRepidation, TRembling, TRebling, STRing kind of motion... anyway, don't get me STarted (this one intends to get somewhere but hasn't yet...)

You just have to turn everything on its side, don't you?..

That's the pyramid with the capstone.

Basically, the problem with Westerners (as well as Asians who didn't have a taoist-proper education) tackling taoist religion mirrors the problem they have had for at least a couple thousand years with their own religions: to wit, they have been bereft of astro-theology, which used to be taught in Mystery Schools, i.e. places of learning and empirical immersion attached to temples and initiating their students on a strictly individual basis. Without such initiation and learning, sincere believers and skeptical "researchers" alike wind up spinning tall tales about deities and demons, and/or debate their existence or non-existence in this or that system. Deities of astro-theology the real science behind "religious" beliefs all have multiple aspects. One of these aspects is often personified and is an actual guy or gal with particular props and assorted features ascribed to them for recognition (or perhaps actually manifesting, should the deity choose to show up as a personified entity, which they can do and would do when the spirit so moves them). This is the aspect the un-initiated and un-educated would be shown. This is kindergarten level of astro-theology, aka "religion." But there's also the Ph.D. level. Westerners have been admitted to this level of their own religions, let alone someone else's, only by the very inner circles whose members don't share their learning with the general population. Most Asians, ditto. As a result they tackle taoist theology from the basis of the same kindergarten-level knowledge and experience they have been led to believe is the whole story. For anyone with even marginal exposure to astro-theology this is exceedingly funny, or else excruciatingly boring, depending on the disposition of his or her "humors." The real events and personages behind every deity are stars and planets, chaos and order, fractals and power laws, time and space, relativity and determinism, existence and creation, nonexistence and destruction, the great cosmic processes of Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation, and on and on. These are learned by immersion, not by choosing a guy or gal to pray to. Taoist astro-theology is not accessible without specific methods of immersion which are neither taught to the idle (or busybody) "researchers" nor constitute common knowledge of sincere "believers" because they have nothing whatsoever to do with beliefs. Interestingly, it is my understanding that even Christianity is in the same boat. I've rather limited exposure to its secret teachings, but even the little I've come across (e.g. some old astro-theological texts of the Rosicrucians) was enough to convince me that it used to be, and for the initiated and secretive still is, a science that goes from the kindergarten toys somewhere where Dorothy promptly discovers she ain't in Kansas anymore.

Feeling better inside is what counts.

This is a breeze -- however, try it with your eyes closed! And a variation: not the circles but the yin-yang symbol with your head, in 3D. And another: not the head but the whole body -- forehead brushing the floor -- while sitting in full lotus. Cat adventures...

Good practice, Nungali. We all have our idiosyncratic balancing routines... I eat my peas with honey; I've done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, But it keeps them on the knife.

Have you ever thought of the words of this popular Christmas song separately from its deceptively cheerful tune? It sounds like an intimidating threat of totalitarian surveillance, of the kind that might originate with the DHS (Department of Human Sacrifice?..) -- menacing and scary, not cheerful at all: You better watch out, You better not cry, Better not pout, I'm telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He's making a list, And checking it twice; Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice.Santa Claus is coming to town. He sees you when you're sleeping, He knows when you're awake, He knows if you've been bad or good, So be good for goodness sake! O! You better watch out!.. etc.

A deity indeed, the supreme one of three realms of the triple realm (this in its turn would require some elaborations -- i.e. he does not rule the whole of the triple realm and the Three Pure Ones rank higher). The Jade Emperor is an avatar of the Three Pure Ones. The relationship between them is like Emptiness ( 虛無 Xuwu ) preceding Subtle Being ( 妙有 Miaoyou ), Infinity ( 無極 Wuji ) preceding the Supreme Ultimate ( 太極 Taiji ), Non-Interference ( 無為 Wuwei ) preceding Interfering Action ( 有為 Youwei ). The Jade Emperor is the master of the three fundamentals in charge of the pivot of Heaven, Earth and Man. The Jade Emperor sends the Great Emperor of the North Pole Star of Purple Subtlety ( 紫微北極大帝 Ziwei Beifi Dadi ) to administer the longitudes and latitudes of Heaven and Earth; the Great Emperor of the Highest Palace of Polaris ( 勾陳上宮大帝 Gouchen Shanggong Dadi ) to administer the Three Powers of Heaven, Earth, and Man and to control wars; and the Imperial God of Earth ( 后土皇地祇 Houtu Huang Di Qi ) to administer births, land, and rivers. In general, all things, Heaven, Earth, Yin and Yang, and creation, are in the charge of the Jade Emperor. An inspiration to us all, he started out as a mortal (most taoist deities did) and attained his status as the Jade Emperor after only 226,800,000 years of cultivation.

I had to try replicating this pose. Well, its power (as well as its difficulty) is in its perfect balance! Pretty hard to find it without the extra arms. The arm that is holding the staff especially, that one is very handy, no pun intended. I had to use my elbow instead, against a leg of the table.

I've come across very different versions of taoism regarding this matter. It is useful to remember that taoism is ancient and huge. Here's for a frame of reference: In 1404, Emperor Zhu Di had appointed 2,182 scholars to undertake a project, the Yong-le-Dadian, to preserve all known literature and knowledge. It was the largest scholarly enterprise ever undertaken. The result was a formidable encyclopedia of 4,000 volumes containing some fifty million characters. Simultaneously Zhu Di ordered the opinions of 120 philosophers and sages to be collated and stored together with the complete commentaries of thinkers from the previous centuries. Simultaneously, hundreds of printed works could be bought from Beijing book stalls. Simultaneously, in Europe, the library of Henry V (1387-1422) comprised six handwritten books, three of which were on loan to him from a nunnery. So anyone who writes about "taoism" as though it is a kind of uniform arrangement would have to ignore so much in order to arrive at any "conclusive" opinion that it is positively scary. I would definitely hold off on any and all assertions along the lines of "there is" or "there isn't" God in taoism, simply because I've come across different "brands" of taoism that are farther apart than Catholicism and Sufism (e.g.), yet unified in a way that does not require a unification around either support or refutation of the monotheistic stance. There's God in some taoism, gods in other, even the Devil is there whenever a particular sect finds him useful, E.g., some sects that work with three basic realities find it convenient to call them "god, man, devil" -- which does not however mean that any of these are empirically approached the way they are approached by a Catholic bishop. It is just a working model useful for some purposes, but it is very dynamic. This is characteristic of the very shamanic model the author is in doubt of having a profound interpenetration throughout taoism, but he might do well considering that the shamanic model, in its universal form, presents three worlds -- lower, middle, upper -- and the difference lies chiefly in terminology, not in empirical explorations. Devil" of taoism is the lower world of shamanism, not hell of Christianity. Similarly, "God" of taoism, which is supposedly equated to Tian, is not god-creator of man (a woman is in charge of that in taoism, or sometimes a couple), and "man" of much of taoism is primarily woman. The Great Mother's child. And The Great Mother is the mother of God, among other things. It all starts coming apart at the seams when one pulls at this thread or that to find out where this or that addition to the "blue robe with scarlet clouds" came from. This piece from here and that one from elsewhere, some sewn on so tightly and so long ago that you can't tell it's not the original taoist garment. But all those colorful pockets can be safely removed and the blue robe with scarlet clouds will still hold its shape, no problem. God is in one of those sewn-on pockets. Some taoists find it very convenient. They keep what they need in that pocket. (A cell phone?.. I mean, prayer, a means to talk to god with words?..)

Ack! Liminal, I wrote a response, but when I pressed "post," the site hiccuped and ate it whole. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

OK, I'll bite... "1. Choose the 3 posters who annoy you the most, this should be really easy . Look on your ignore list if you are having trouble with this." I don't have an ignore list, and I choose just one poster for the purposes of this survey... I wonder if you can guess who that is... "2. Ask yourself which aspects of what they post and their behavior and who they are annoy you." This poster butts into taoist discussions with disinformation, misinformation, derails, smug remarks belittling others and invalidating any and all opinions or information under discussion, tiptoeing into "impersonal" insults that are however insulting to anyone born in the group he does not believe can do anything taoist right ("people of a certain kind are unable to understand what people of a certain other kind had in mind and there's no way for them to get it, they are born ignorant and they will die ignorant no matter what they do because they are, well, the wrong kind of people, and I'm the right kind, so whatever I say is true and whatever YOU say is false."); he offers tired boring platitudes and trite uninspired personal interpretations, regurgitated junk science picked up on the go, pathetic junior high level (or below) snippets of orthodox western sciences he may have once been very slightly and very one-sidedly exposed to and dimly remembers something or other about; is not a taoist, has no teacher and never had one, has no real practice and no exposure to anything lineage, traditional, reputed, legitimate taoist; never had any oral or energetic transmissions, does not have and never had access to taoist schools or sects or communities or workshops or live gatherings where practitioners of taoist arts might have given him a reality check; ignores and dismisses absolutely all reality checks offered on the forum by experienced and dedicated practitioners of taoist arts; BUT he is invariably hogging every thread on taoist subjects and more often than not is the first one to respond with god-awful nonsense whenever someone asks a question. He acts as an inverted Midas -- every thread he touches turns to shit. "3 a. Ask yourself which aspects of each of these people remind you of yourself and which aspects of yourself (damn mirrors) b. Ask yourself when is the first time you experienced such a person, or behavior, or the thing that annoys you about each person? Or even just other times in your life. " I did enough work on myself (of the quite excruciating kind, even risking my life in the process) to have earned within myself a place from which I trust myself to perceive others adequately, without the typical distortions that people for whom "know thyself" has never been a priority, a quest, or a road to survival are prone to. I don't believe I've anything to project on this poster. I don't do what he does, and what he does I don't like not because something is wrong with me but because everything something is wrong with what he does. "4. (optional) ask yourself "why am I closing my heart to this person." I'm not closing my heart to this person. I would just like to close the taoist forum to this person, for reasons stated above. ...I'm told (by D.T. Suzuki if I remember correctly) that the Buddha once asked a disciple of his to clean his bath tub. The Buddha wanted to take a bath, the disciple wanted to serve him, so far so good. The Buddha disrobed, only to find that the disciple hadn't done anything. "Why is it still dirty?" he inquired mildly. "There's some insects crawling on the bottom, so I can't clean it, because per your own teachings, oh Enlightened One, I am not supposed to harm live creatures." The Buddha whacked him on the head and said, "Just clean it and spare me..."

His favorite toy is a simple rubber band, and after he is done chasing it and hunting it and propelling it this way and that, I invariably find it in his bowl of water. If I give him two, three, four, etc., rubber bands, eventually they all are neatly deposited into that bowl. But so far I have never been able to see the actual moment of throwing them in. He keeps the technique secret. I don't know if he uses his paws or his teeth, and whether he throws it from afar or just dunks it in. He does it every day, but the secret has never been revealed. Maybe I'll install a camera to find out...

Ah, the real cat. My grandmother had a cat who hunted, but she ate the mice (the cat did, not my grandmother), and birds too. The technique for catching a bird was indeed magical -- that cat could fly! A friend of mine who is into cats AND birds trained her bird-hunting cat to walk on a leash like a dog for the specific purpose of protecting the birds. She swears that sometimes she has to use all her strength to restrain the cat when the bird is within reach. She's a heavy, muscular woman, who usually wins against men in judo and tennis, but she was unable to stop the cat on a couple of occasions.