Taomeow

Yes. Moreover, since I've been initiated into this school during my Chinese teacher's visit to Russia, I am familiar with the way it is translated into Russian too -- and "all true" ain't it. Ever heard the Italian traduttore traditore -- "translator, traitor?" A literal rendition of what you find in the dictionary is what is meant by this saying, rather well known among professional translators. I used to be one, incidentally... and they teach a professional translator how NOT to translate literally. Amateurs who like correcting "incorrect" translations might do well reading up on that a bit methinks. I did technical translations, often of the texts I flat out couldn't understand unless I educated myself on the subject matter. So the engineers who were my customers would sit down with me and I would ask them to explain the actual process that was the subject matter of the article or book -- for no special term encountered in a specialized context actually meant what you could get from a common dictionary, you needed a specialized one and even that only scratched the surface. How would you translate "pigging," e.g., if you didn't know what the particular process employed in the particular context of occurrence is about?..

Some pope made it up. Maybe the same one who prohibited by decree the original Christian belief in reincarnation. Why mind control professionals choose to control your mind this way rather than that way is a function of what they are trying to accomplish. In this particular case, they accomplish confusion, which is one of their favorite techniques. A confused mind is much easier to control than a clear one. A lot of stuff in a lot of scriptures, contemplated and mused on and argued about for centuries, is there for exactly this purpose. Tao equips you naturally to get it right, you know how to use your equipment just because you come complete with it. When hungry, eat. When sleepy, sleep. When hurt, cry out. When pensive, meditate. When blasphemous... ???... -- not part of the equipment, so there's no right or wrong way to use it, just as there is no right or wrong way to fill up a garbage pail in your kitchen. The important thing is to remember to throw the garbage out on a regular basis and not let it fester, is all.

I don't know if you realize that teachers who offer their teachings as paid services must comply with the laws of the country where the services are rendered. Any one of them who is in the public eye will say the same thing about an issue that could get them in legal trouble unless they say what is implicitly demanded of them by law. As a result, any and all speeches they make on a legally sensitive subject boil down to "I'm not a threat, I conform and obey, please don't hurt me, Big Brother."

Native Americans call everything that has Power of the Great Spirit "medicine." If a "drug" has it, it's a medicine, but most drugs are actually materialized (via external alchemy) entities of the netherworld (the dead dug up from the depth of the earth -- many are actually petrochemicals based and most contain at least some petrochemicals), designed to take power away from you and give it to those who send them into the world for this specific task. These are, technically, not "medicines" in the shamanic sense but a separate category -- "poisons." Poisons work by taking your Power away, medicines work by giving it to you. This is a very useful distinction IMO. And, yes, it's not just substances, anything can be a medicine or a poison. "Drugs" are mostly poisons, while sacred plants are mostly medicines.

A quiet lemon falls with a splash, and the creek says its name: Kerplunk!

Now why the quoting box holds soaring crane responsible for my octopus is anyone's guess. (And I changed it a bit because turns out it's Ringo Starr's dream, but Ringo has one syllable too many in his first name, and one extra consonant in his last.) Everyone you meet walks in a rainbow aura. Want to paint it black?

Nightmare of the shrimp, the octopus, Beatles's dream. Garden in the shade...

Thank you for posting, I will give a better read to it a bit later (gotta run, I'm looking at the forum, as usual, when I take breaks while otherwise busy), but from the title I can already hypothesize you're on the right track. I have experienced first hand what was termed "broken gates" rather than "broken shields" but it's the same thing. Once the defense mechanisms usually keeping it all down are compromised, your consciousness gets flooded with material from your very own unconscious (not with nasties from outside yourself, mind you) and that's when the conscious mind goes south, because it is absolutely not equipped to cope. Back when it happened, many moons ago, I damaged my gates ("shields") with meditation, I never took any drugs, not before and not after (I hate drugs with a passion, and have objected on many occasions to the use of the term "drugs" to refer to sacred plants, in my native tongue the practice is called mixing strawberry marmalade with gramophone needles -- can I have the marmalade separately, without the needles please? -- no, our policy is to only supply them mixed together... So, when I damaged my gates with meditation, I wasn't familiar with either, i.e. never tried any sacred plants either. My ayahuasca journey took place much later.) Later...

"Psychological disorders and possible insanity" is what I see every day in the ordinary world -- in people whose only drugs are patented designer chemicals prescribed by their physicians, in addition to the ones they consume with their... er... daily bread.

DMT is a drug. Stay away. Ayahuasca is a sacred medicinal plant, an entheogen. Stay away unless you are in a sacred medicinal context. It has nothing in common with drugs. Was not created in a lab, can't cause a "dependency," can't get anyone "addicted." Exercise your natural intelligence to discern between mislabeled phenomena. Labels are not phenomena. To go along with someone else's use of these is common if the mind is drugged with propaganda and conditioning, and altered on a continuous (typically lifelong) basis. Detoxify your mind from this most dangerous drug or any practice whatsoever will only be of limited usefulness. You can start with your use of the labels -- "drug," "substance." I suggest meditating on them, one at a time, till they reveal to you their origins and their role in shaping your mind to fit into a particular mold. Meditate on that mold. Then it's up to you to decide if you find the shape revealed organic and sound, man-made and artificial, or archon-made -- alien, artificial, and hostile to the human mind. Meditation techniques that enhance rather than eliminate cognizance of phenomena vary from tradition to tradition -- ironically, ayahuasca is one such venue, it equips the mind to look at itself, among other things. Of course if you have a good teacher (e.g. of the purely cognitive aspects of raja yoga), you can take the long way home. The important thing is the destination, not the journey (that's right, new age one-liners don't know everything) -- just like traveling by plane from, say, Missouri to Tahiti, you don't do it for the plane ride, you do it for the mangoes.

A quick search yielded a more conservative estimate by Salary.com -- $113,586 but it may have something to do with the part of the country surveyed (the original I seem to recall was from New York/New Jersey): "Moms (and yes, some dads, too) do double duty as chauffeurs, cooks, psychologists, money managers and more, on average clocking a 94-hour work week, according to Salary.com. Based on the 10 most time consuming tasks listed by more than 6,000 mothers, Salary.com estimated it would cost $113,586 a year to replace them. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/value-of-stay-at-home-moms-2013-5#ixzz2kqyqzhzS

Yes, I've seen this too -- people don't believe it's a true value if they are not asked to give an arm and a leg to get it. A finance expert calculated about ten years ago that a stay-at-home mom performs services that would cost $160K annually if hired professionals were employed to perform them instead. It's probably much higher today. Yet the general consensus is, she is "doing nothing," and it doesn't occur to the general public (or, occasionally, the working spouse) to respect her work, since no price tag is hanging off its true value. Whereas a "professional" woman making this kind of money doing stuff for whoever is not her own family is respected and thought of as a hard-working successful individual.

It's in BKA's PPF -- here: http://thetaobums.com/topic/32536-house-hotel-hostel/#entry496436 As for giving something as an "exchange" or freely with nothing given back -- this is entirely up to the giver I guess. I usually give more than I get, and chalk it up to the layout of my Four Pillars. (The lucky ones have plenty to give, the less lucky ones have plenty others want to get but no recourse to replenishment, they either have to work on replenishing themselves or get depleted too fast. The most unlucky ones have nothing to give and no way to get.) There's people who can afford to give of themselves freely and there's people who know that they can't -- usually intuitively -- and then there's the majority, people who don't give freely regardless of whether they can afford it or not, simply because the whole culture is the anti-giving, gimme kind and they have never experienced anything else first hand. So, I don't judge. If they feel they can't afford to give freely, this must be true, for whatever reason.

Yes, but to get this to work you do need some mixer, I didn't like the hand-shaken version that much. DrinkMaster makes it foamy and creamy with coconut oil, even somewhat chocolaty, don't know why. I am also a fan of raw organic cocoa butter in this recipe, but this one I get tired of after a while and need a break, ditto coconut oil. Butter -- I never get tired of butter. (Just recently one of my dreamtime teachers made fun of me because of that, asserting there's a particular hand gesture of magical significance he would show me "if your fingers weren't all buttery." I'm guessing I need to take a coffee break for this one... ...or at least stick with coconut oil for a while, see what happens.)

For those who are experimenting with the Bulletproof recipe (butter in coffee): I found an ideal contraption to make it. It's an old-fashioned device that used to be popular for milkshakes, I'm guessing globally because it was quite prominent in my childhood overseas too. Here it is: SInce what I use it for is a hot drink rather than a cold one, and splashy rather than gooey, some minor modifications to the process shown in the video are required: I made a lid for the cup out of a piece of folded foil, with a hole for the "toothpick" to go through, and cover the cup with that, 'cause the first time I used the device and didn't, I got some hot coffee splash out onto my hand (ouch); and the cup actually needs to be held by hand when it is not filled up full enough to give it more stability, so I hold it with a small hand towel ( a couple of folded paper towels work too). Other than that -- perfect. If you are going to use this, please make sure you realize you're dealing with an off-label use of the device (mixing a hot drink rather than a cold one), and take all the above-mentioned precautions to heart.

On the very first page of this site this is listed as one of the "a few veggie facts": "Going vegetarian can reduce your carbon footprint, help conserve land and water and protect the oceans." I think I've had enough. Have fun everyone. I think I've had enough not only with this thread but with everything else for the moment. Sometimes it breaks my heart to be a member of the human race.

That''s true, re-adjustments to different diets (even superior ones) are always taxing. There's two reasons I could "afford" to do it but wouldn't recommend this route to others: First, I am not one of those people who are "massively" affected by what they eat or don't eat. I have weaker and stronger systems healthwise, and my digestive system happens to be my strong one (in fact I have to watch out, following the TCM premise that strong systems may take the power from the not-so-strong ones, and make sure I don't encourage it to Attack-- TCM term -- other systems downstream the cycle of wuxing.) I've eaten with impunity on four continents, under all kinds of dietary conditions, and haven't noticed much difference unless I introduced a drastic dietary change myself, and not that much difference even then. Second, I am not an amateur in the field, I've invested thousands of hours of interdisciplinary research and integration over the years, so I usually know what I'm doing. What I'm trying to accomplish is a whole range of goals, which change as I go. E.g., to address my weaker systems via my stronger one (TCM premise again -- "take from the Grandmother, give to the Child," e.g., or "nourish the Mother to heal the Child," etc.); to match whatever practice I'm engaged in to what I eat (some require short term fasting, e.g. taoist magical work, some require short term vegetarian periods -- about a week -- e.g. some alchemical junctures; some require superalimentation -- e.g. emotionally charged situations, which cause some people to gain weight but in my case the opposite is true; and the like.) Also to follow my own moral code, I don't eat foods I find immoral -- GM, slave-labor produced, toxically altered, pushed on the public to serve corporate interests of Big Pharma and Big Farma, and so on. More information or better understanding results in changes on occasion. E.g., I don't eat chocolate unless I know its source is not child labor in Africa. Don't eat my absolute favorite yin vegetable, nagaimo (mountain yam or dioscorea) ever since Fukushima, since it's imported from Japan and is likely to be radioactive. And so on.

Well, since I've turned myself into the combo of the researcher and lab mouse wrapped into one for purposes of at least a dozen unusual diets, I've seen all the reactions. Family and friends -- well, my mom's friend told her I need to have my head checked out because I talk about nutrition too much. (Maybe I did, that was a long time ago and I just discovered the depth of the subject for myself and was completely blown away.) Macrobiotic -- "they say it's about eating simple and local so why do you eat all these Japanese foods in Northern New Jersey?" (great point, by the way, it shamed me out of the macrobiotic experiment soon enough.) Vegetarian -- four versions (Gerson inspired, with lots of green juices and no dairy, ovo-lacto vegetarian, vegan, raw) -- this was weird for many on the East coast but perfectly fine on the West coast. (Fruits and nuts are common here. ) Ketogenic, two versions (carbs limited to 20% but indiscriminate, and hardcore paleo with zero carbs, high fat, moderate protein) -- I got a whole bunch of lectures from every expert (who ISN'T an expert when it comes to food -- everybody knows everything, right?) and I was briefly going out with a geneticist who insisted I "monitor my cholesterol" every time we ate out. Abstaining From Grains taoist (eating to 75% of my "total hunger" etc.) -- well, since I cited beliefs that were chalked up to my "religion," this could fly a bit better. In general, social "side effects" of any diet you might try are mitigated greatly if you claim a disorder (e.g. an uncommon religion, or this or that intolerance or allergy -- this makes it OK to eat what you eat in other people's eyes.)

I think that's where love finally comes into the picture. I suspect people who don't go against their culture were loved children once -- not loved the way we see children "loved" when mom calls from work and dispenses an obligatory "I love you" over the phone. And not loved in the head, from a safe physical and emotional distance, the way an estranged or emotionally unavailable dad "loves" his children. No. They were kids whose mothers didn't wear their photographs in the wallet, squeezed in between credit cards, to show to the world that they indeed had a child -- here's your documented proof. No. Those other mothers carried the actual child in their arms. And did it in a manner that would require the child to be massively abnormal to rebel against. Some cultures fare better than yours or mine in this respect, though in modern times few are perfect. It is a little known fact that the real and exceptionally reliable predictor of whether a culture will manifest itself as peaceful or belligerent is the way it treats its infants and small children. If this treatment is based on the idea that the child is all wrong until made right, and sets about making and breaking him or her to fit a particular mold, it is going to be warlike -- and the harsher the treatment, the more aggressive. If children are loved in the form of actual accepting and caring physical presence of the parents, never abused, even are "spoiled" (in our understanding of the word, i.e. never punished for being, well, children), the culture is going to be peaceful. In neither scenario food choices have any impact. (Source: Derrick Jensen, "A Language Older Than Words.")

I_am, thank you for granting the benefit of your superb reading comprehension to my humble contributions. I feel exceptionally strongly about the issue for a bunch of reasons -- I mentioned that I've been doing nutritional/herbal consulting for a good number of years, so what I get to experience by way of health, moral status and so on of people coming from all manner of dietary backgrounds is not limited to my own experiences with personal choices and theoretical musings by any stretch of imagination. I've seen people die because of dietary fundamentalism, and I've seen people sentenced to death come back to life, and even now, as this discussion unfolded, I found myself facing a bit of a dilemma... I've been asked to do a consultation for a woman from India, aged 30 and diagnosed with cancer. She is a cultural vegetarian, and has never even tasted meat, fish or eggs in her entire life. The cancer she has developed, a blood-based one, has a particular affinity to vegetarians, not all of them but those who have unfortunate immune system abnormalities which result in an ongoing immune conflict that sooner or later can cause either the B-lymphocytes or the T-lymphocytes or both to mutate. Eating animal products can't prevent this by itself unless the true offenders are removed from the diet, but it can often delay it, because of a whole host of protective factors in healthy meats and seafood (l-carnosine, butyrates, fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E, omega-3s, B-6 and B-12, folate, zinc, and on and on -- long-term vegetarians tend to be low or deficient on some or all of these, in addition to underproducing HGH, proteolytic pancreatic enzymes that are potent cancer busters, and on and on. The junk science that ignores all these factors or attributes diseases of vegetarians to some other factors abounds, but I'm light years past that, wouldn't even know where to start -- dinosaurs? trilobites? -- how far back I would have to go to disentangle the knot of BS. Kellog's invention of breakfast cereals to clean out 'impure" morals of "bad Christians?" The fact that India which has the highest percentages of vegetarians also has cardiovascular disease rates that are the highest in Asia, and in women, as high as in the US, which for the rest of Asia is unheard of? Honestly, I know too much to even be in this thread, and I made a grave mistake as I mentioned earlier when I thought I could do something useful by just recommending a book and bailing out. God only knows an online black hole can exert a strong enough pull to pull one in against her best judgment. I take the responsibility for not noticing soon enough that this is one of those.) So, back to the Indian woman. Long story short, I learned two things about real (cultural, traditional) vegetarians so far. First, they do not let their dietary tradition spill over into larger issues of life and death, right and wrong, and so on. She was pregnant with her second child when she was diagnosed with cancer, and opted for an abortion so as not to delay the treatment. It never occurred to her or her husband (who is our translator, since her English is limited) to drag any "moral" considerations into this decision, it was just something that "happened the way it happened, bad timing to bring another child into the world, hopefully there's going to be a better time for this in the future." Second -- it was immediately clear to me that the woman's vegetarianism is nothing to argue about, it is what it is and we should work with it, there's no "personal choice" involved in true cultural vegetarianism, you are born into that, you can't choose or abandon this, and by the same token, if you are born in a Chukchi family of reindeer herders in the tundra, you are born into your tradition and you can't question eating meat anymore than you can question your parents' and grandparents' and ancestors' right to live, to be on this earth. But, without of course questioning, even for a second, the vegetarian status of this lady, because in this situation I am definitely not entitled to (if it was a Western vegetarian with this kind of complications, of course the first thing I would say would be, "frackin' quit it already"), I had a dilemma. She needs supplements to make up for all the deficiencies (which, incidentally, were confirmed by lab tests I asked her to ask her doctor to order, measuring the levels of a few crucial vitamins and minerals) and among these I mentioned desiccated liver tablets and fish oil, which would cover some of the territory if accepted. She asked if that's available in capsules. Yes. Would you take these? Yes, absolutely. There we go. I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course it never occurred to me to point out that these are actually animal foods-- calling them "supplements" does not change the source they come from, animals. I'm sure she understands that (she has an MS in physics and is very intelligent overall), but... again, I saw an aspect of a cultural vegetarian that I have never seen in vegetarians "by choice." Subjectively, I feel much more empathy for cultural vegetarianism than for the countercultural kind (to me, the latter is often just infantile rebellion against the family and society, basically an equivalent of throwing an existential tantrum -- while I can understand the emotions behind it full well and have been tempted to throw one on many occasions myself, still an adult might want to look for more productive expressions of dissent methinks...)

We are not going after anyone. We are trying to put to rest some delusions -- e.g. of moral superiority of vegetarians as a group and their excessive peacefulness as a group. These are lies. We are going after the lies. Does it bother you?

I think going to reliable sources, getting the record straight, and gaining a clear picture in one's mind is worth it though, for any and all purposes -- even this one. It's true that people tend to get tired fast of facts that don't agree with their ideology, but sometimes one has to tolerate this exhaustion brought about by blows to his or her credo... this, too, is cultivation, and might make an idea or two weaker but YOU, only stronger. So, according to his food taster, the unnameable Godwin point was a dedicated one hundred percent vegetarian, see the testimony: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/9859294/Hitlers-food-taster-speaks-of-Fuhrers-vegetarian-diet.html (Please copy/paste the link, it appears to be unclickable but if you paste it it takes you there.)

My pleasure -- and I thank you for your open-minded and thoughtful consideration. For me, Zhuangzi has long been one of the great sources of inspiration as well.

http://thetaobums.com/topic/19929-zuowang/