Taomeow

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.

If we move furniture for whatever reason, I always find those multicolored plastic caplocks -- they are from kefir or lassi bottles, another one of Haomao's infatuations. I used to find rubber bands too, but maybe won't next time -- the basketball thing is a new invention, he's been doing this only for a few months, previously he would eventually lose them under the sofa or suchlike. Which is why I am not sure about the food connection. It looks like a sport, not like good housekeeping -- besides, cats don't stash away food for future reference (unlike dogs), they want everything fresh. Haomao doesn't like to have to finish any leftovers from his previous meal, and will meow till I give him something mew new.

Yes, and it's coming over Fire in the Earthly Branch. Yang Wood thrown into Yang Fire at that. The horse will be very excitable, not a docile animal at all. If we had trouble the previous year, we will have double in this one. ...unless... ..???..

The OP quote, which I remember well from the very first read years ago, does not advise on protecting the environment though, only self. What if the petty tyrants, aka bullies (who typically come in three varieties, the smart malicious bully, the dumb malicious bully, and the meddling idiot), don't bother you personally in the least but are preventing the environment you're in from thriving?.. What if it never grows to its full potential, nor even halfway there, because of the tyranny of the petty bullies? What would constitute victory -- abandoning the environment and going elsewhere, investing time, thoughtful strategy, and will into fixing it, or just ignoring its sad state brought about by a few to the detriment of many and carrying on as though nothing is wrong?

Great animals!

Exactly. Not only in MA though. There's many external practices that do nothing except manipulate the make-believe picture. The most notable being the whole outcropping of "positive thinking" applications (the gift of the CIA to the New Age movement, actually, if you go for where this whole 'lineage" really comes from). A friend of mine called all these -- anger management, unconditional love, random acts of kindness, suppression of negative (but real) emotions and expression of positive (but fake) ones "fucking with the surface." That's some existential photoshop going on if you ask me...

When I was little, I participated in printing photographs, my father's hobby, and in the mysterious darkened space lit only by a glareless red light, I'd be looking at a blank sheet of photographic paper at first, then it would be exposed to some light filtered through a particular frame of the film and projected onto the paper, then I would carefully grab the edge with forceps and immerse it into a bath of liquid -- and the picture would start coming out, faint at first, ghostly, but gradually getting clearer, sharper, and then you fish it out and immerse into another bath that will stabilize it. And then you hang it to dry, or slap it onto a polished drying surface, or just on a mirror so it acquires a shiny gloss. Very magical and alchemical. So I want to do this with my life -- first have the exposure to see what that picture really is, and then stabilize it if I like it -- or discard it if I don't and do the next one. Karma is like prior exposure of the film, it's not like cause and effect or crime and punishment, it's more like exposure and imprinting. And practice -- that's your photo lab. First you allow the picture to come out, then you look at it and decide if you like it, and then, if it's a taoist practice, you decide if you want to change it -- on any level -- including on the level of prior exposure. People today who know photoshop have a false sense of practice -- photoshop is the way to change the picture without changing the "what really happened," the whole of reality behind it. I think many erroneously transfer the idea of the ease of this process, which they don't even have to understand in order to use, to their lives, their karma, their practice that mostly happens on the "make-believe" level. So I'm after alchemical practices because they start out with letting the real picture come out, and then go for to change, at will or on a whim, the very reality that made this picture happen to begin with. Roam the root of heaven and earth, as taoists say.

LOL, you may be onto something... but this one seems like pure recreational sport. I'll ask someone who understands these things to check the belt, but I doubt it's about that, the cat doesn't seem to have any auto mechanic's skills at all. I don't leave the rubber bands everywhere, he asks for them, so I give him one every time he does. He sometimes gets it himself from the drawer where they're kept, by pulling it out and fishing for the rubber band of his choice (I think green are his favorite). But he prefers to be served, so if he has to get one himself, he sort of snubs me for a while. Sometimes I think the purpose of the game is to have me puzzled as to the technique of throwing one in the bowl, it's like a koan for me... Today, e.g., he was playing with a rubber band inches away from his food station/watering hole, and I got my camera ready to record the dunking moment. He kept going around and around though, playing part hockey, part soccer, but refusing to make that mysterious basketball move in front of me. He finally dunked his tail in his bowl of tuna, got very embarrassed for a second but then, as cats do so as not to lose face, pretended that he intended just that all along, that it was not an accident but a version of the game. So he abandoned the rubber band and attended to the tail instead.

Green Tiger, cats are not insane, there's a method to their madness. Sometimes it takes a very bright human mind in its highest gear to understand what they mean... but they always mean something. I once had a cat (or as the song goes, "she once had me") who would, on occasion, get in the bath tub, stand on her hind legs and scratch the side of the tub with her front claws, with this hoeowrrrrrible screeching sound that makes all the little hairs on your body stand on end, and meow very low then very high, and very loud, with urgency and despair and perhaps a bit of threat in the tone of voice. I couldn't figure out what this meant for a long time. Then one day I realized that she does it whenever she thinks her litter box needs changing. She couldn't show it with the litter box directly though because we kept it in the basement, so she extended the idea of "cat cleanliness" to "human cleanliness," which she figured was accomplished in the bath tub, and was trying to impress the symbolic meaning of her behavior (the idea of cleanliness!) on the two-legged creatures, using the props she hoped they would understand (the bath tub, and causing their awareness to focus on it and contemplate it till they get it). Who'd have guessed that cats can form complex symbolic, metaphoric contexts? -- and then figure out a way to make the message strong and annoying enough for the humans to be unable to simply ignore it? And offer a deal while at it?! -- the meowing and scratching in the bath tub stopped once I changed her litter to fresh, and if I never wanted to hear it again, all I needed to do was stay on top of it so it's always fresh. Which was a fair trade-off.

Editing my response to ChiDragon, because with his characteristic impeccable honesty he changed what he originally wrote as soon as I responded to it.

Of course peng is the throughout thing, it's an outer expression of our internal structure, which happens to be a spiral. There was a recent thread illustrating that the heart is a spiral -- well, so is every bone in the body! And the "fascia suit" -- not just of an individual muscle but connected all through into one twisted "inner shirt." ("Anatomy Trains" has amazing illustrations of this overlooked and neglected major structural feature of the human body.) Tense muscles, chronically contracted fascia (which correspond to chronically lax ones on the opposite side -- like an ill-fitting internal suit, and sometimes like a straightjacket), locked joints, a lack of feeling and connection between different parts of the body make it impossible to perceive peng naturally (the way it was perhaps perceived in prehistory) without special training, but it is in fact a sense, that of one's own inherent tangible physical structure. Good taiji awakens peng, in fact Chen style is sometimes referred to simply as "the art of peng" by family members. Taiji techniques are applications of peng, of what your body can do when it is thoroughly "fitting you inside," not just outside, and is under your control -- inside and out. Not sure I understand what you (and/or BKF?) mean by force rising up and then not necessarily sinking down. It is my current understanding that when this is the case, it's a mistake of execution or structure or both. The forces that prevent downward flow are tensions and locked passages and misalignments. This is known as "floating" or being "top heavy."

Did I spell that right? Copacetic now, the stars bring Peach Blossom Luck.

NotVoid, like I said earlier, it's easy to make into a gimmick, but the real thing is actually sensorily impressive, if you participate in it. The reason it is used by masters who have nothing to prove is that it proves something to a body participating in this traditional demo of taiji mechanics. Observers get very little or nothing out of it. Participants get something they would be hard pressed to explain, and then just remember. So, it's a useful demo for those it is demonstrated to, in traditional taiji demonstrations nothing is useless, and everything is a gimmick, taiji is the art of faking the laws of physics as they are being perceived by the opponent, from beginning to end. How do you fake them? By creating different ones for the opponent to perceive. By manipulating their reality, no less. Gods engage in this -- all our consensual reality is predicated on everybody agreeing (not in the head, deeper) to perceive roughly the same things when getting stimuli from the environment. Taiji of a high level makes this agreement nil and void. You impose a different perceptual reality on the opponent. This is the ultimate gimmick, but you have to have been there (the generic you, not you personally), on the receiving end of high skill, to appreciate its impact. Being part of such a train gives you a taste. Being one on one with a master whose skill is light years ahead of yours gives you a puzzle... you simply don't have a frame of reference for the experience, it's indigenous and idiosyncratic to high level taiji and can't be understood in the head at all -- only received systemically. But once you receive it, you will never doubt the party who gave it to you, you will just try to emulate him or her in your practice, monkey see monkey do. So if they do something that the you-in-the-head has a disagreement with, after the experience the disagreement vanishes, your whole system learns to trust what they're doing no matter what they're doing, and do your best to learn to do likewise. It's not a lineage art for nothing, it's the outcome of students having been impressed by what they experienced coming in contact with masters -- in a long line of gaping noobs spanning centuries...

No, it wouldn't. The second guy could stand opening the qua and the knee some more. This would peng out the left (? closer to the observer) leg. The ankle-knee axis is thrust forward instead of spiraling toward the back, and too straight -- the twisting power that goes into the ground like a screw is not there.

Pretty good analysis. These are all people with very modest taiji experience, the picture is from ten years ago. Some remained at this "perennial beginner" level, but not all. The first guy in particular has grown very considerably in his taiji, and keeps growing. His current form is a pleasure to behold -- soft and precise, with all its power hidden well away. He also has a taiji personality, yielding without weakness. Really good tao.

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Good on you! You're right, it's quite doable once you know what you're doing. I've seen a whole train of people pushed like that (but if someone posts it on youtube, the "theorists" provide ample comments along the lines of, "fake!" Actually the theorists would be unable to tell whether it's fake or not. Easy to fake, this is, if anyone is interested in faking it instead of really making it in taiji. I went for a pic from my own archives because I could testify under oath that, to the best of my knowledge, my classmates did not conspire with the visiting master to fake it.) I've even seen this (in real life) done on one leg and with a large, full to the brim glass of whisky in one hand, which never spilled except into the master's gullet, little by little. In theory, any amount of force can be transferred into the ground and back at the pushing party. So this spiral that goes down, below your center of gravity, and back up from the back foot to the front and into the hands, it's like a spring, the harder you compress it, the stronger it will decompress back into its original shape. And this original shape, a function of impeccable structure in four dimensions and thirteen directions, is peng.

Here he is pushing 8 of my taiji classmates at a workshop. Everybody flies!

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They are indeed physically close, but functionally different. Much of the endocrine system in classical TCM falls under the wuxing category of Fire, along with the heart (and, interestingly, the small intestine, which of course needs Fire to "cook" what we eat.) Adrenals are one of the fiery organs (think adrenaline!) and are in charge of processing stress -- by providing the "fuel" to burn -- well, jing, what else -- in the form of stress-mediating hormones, chiefly cortisol, catecholamines, epinephrine and norepinephrine. They facilitate functioning under conditions of stress but at the cost of depleting the health basis of the organism, jing. The Water-Fire interactions of Kidneys and adrenal glands are pretty complex, and far as I've been able to discern, when one has a say in whether to add stress to one's life (not always the case, obviously), it's way better to let the Kidneys set the pace and the adrenals (and the heart) to follow, rather than vice versa. Not a good idea to force the Kidneys (via lifestyle choices) to try matching the activities of the adrenals, because the only way they can do it is by throwing jing into the fire. (Incidentally, this is why high-performance elite athletes, usually people who start out in life with an abundance of jing, are not long-lived.)

Intimately. But human sexuality is not limited to jing aspects, and jing is not limited to sexual functions. The primary function of sex is reproduction, the secondary function of sex is redirection (of other drives that didn't find their expression under modern social conditions -- e.g. closeness to other beings, exchange of physical and emotional states with other beings, sharing, giving and receiving pleasure, "marking the territory," claiming and ownership, belonging and possessing, acceptance and guidance, and also healing); the tertiary function of sex is neurotic trauma processing with sadistic, masochistic, or otherwise warfare-like expressions (internal or external or both -- this is an unhealthy scenario but it is the prevalent sexual mode of our time, which proves that sex can be used this way and is in fact a preferred medium of "dumping" for many. Much like legs can be used for stepping on people's throats or arms can be used for pulling triggers, though it wouldn't occur to a student of physiology that this is their primary biological designation). Jing is involved in sexual functions of the primary and secondary type, since reproduction is contingent on its ability to store and transmit memory (of how to put together a human being), and redirection, on its inherent features of the Wood phase of wuxing, "life on earth," which make it mobile and give it a tendency to propagate in all directions. (Pre-heaven jing is Water- like, post-heaven propagation of jing is like that of Water's wuxing Child phase, which is Wood. No erection-related pun intended, though it seems unavoidable. )

This is absolutely correct. This is not the number of an anti-whatever though, it's just what you said -- the "real" number, the number of Reality. Did you actually notice something I wrote a long time ago, or was it an independent discovery? Or a good taoist source?