Taomeow

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A taoist is like melting ice carefully stepping on melting ice. (Inspired by Laozi Ch. 15)

The most complete and detailed classifications of demons can be found in esoteric Islam. Other traditions had their moments too when demons became so prominent that vast taxonomies were undertaken, but much of that knowledge is either lost or went underground. Particular temperatures are associated with lesser, one-phase ("element') demons, of which some are cold, some are fiery, and some are foul smelling on top of that, while others are neither hot nor cold but instead heavy, or restless, or lusty, etc. etc.. Some are very ugly and some are very beautiful in ways that wouldn't be recognized as beauty by undamaged senses. The bigger and more powerful ones (the "incorporated" ones which are composite entities spread over vast territories, sometimes globally) don't manifest their presence in ways immediately available to human sensory perceptions, which are increasingly being shut down from before birth by assorted demonic interventions, and consequently mistake demonic manifestations for the normal ambient conditions. Demonology is a dangerous area of study, one of the most hazardous esoteric occupations. The danger is twofold -- they can destroy and they can seduce.

Stamp of immortals: seven stars in the middle, five phases around 5 7 5

Branches in the dark gesticulating wildly to the wind: this way!

Beginners don't know that they don't know, the self-important will never know that they never will. Those who are both advanced and realistic know what they don't have -- that's their most important advantage, the "know thyself" ace that trumps every other card in the game. They also know that if they "don't believe a word anyone says," they have nowhere to get it. The more authentic and sincere the practice, the less room for cocky "I know and have and can better than anyone else can teach me" -- it's like an inverted cone of hubris, the deeper you go, the less room for that. TTB has a sprinkling of both kinds of practitioners statistically commensurate with their numbers in the larger world. I.e. of course there's cocky beginners (but they might learn later), and there's inflated perennial beginners (who read a couple of books and had a mystical surge of some internal opiates in response to whatever fleeting glitch in their glitchy metabolism, which they take to have been enlightenment and consequently believe they've already arrived... these never will), and of course there's also sincere and humble (and sincere and not-so-humble) beginners who know they're that, and all these together vastly outnumber true masters and masters-in-the-making. It's always been like that everywhere.

I understand. My response was an answer in the form of a rhetorical question.

"Dumb, then, for the merely not-yet-dead of us to love the thing that kills us. But I do. So beautiful, so various, so new. Some times I want to bang their heads on the Universe and scream, 'It's beautiful, you balmy bastards! THIS IS NOT A DREAM.' " ---- George Starbuck, "The Universe is Closed and Has REMs"

"The Secret History of the World" by Mark Booth is the one I'm reading right now, and it's got some worthy information, though it is more of an appetizer than a main dish... Concurrently I'm reading a book I chanced upon at a used books store, a 19th century Rosicrucian astrology (more like astro-theology), and the two may have blended together somewhat in my mind... but I'll recommend that other one if I find it worthy (and if you can find it), I've just started this one and don't know yet.

IAM, congrats on a brave experiment! What you describe is an incomplete process -- the reason may be the size and shape of your ibrik not matching the amount of water and coffee you used. I.e. it may be too big, in which case the cork that forms won't be thick enough for the stuff underneath to build up enough pressure for the fine foam to break through. When you start, the level of your ibrik's contents must come to just below the narrow part (if it's got a "neck," that's right under the "base of the neck" -- if it doesn't it is a bit different... does it?) If you taste sugar, it means the pressure was not enough and the resulting liquid an outcome of incomplete extraction. So, if your ibrik is too big for 3t/1t/1cup to come to below the narrow point, you need to increase the amount of everything -- water, sugar and coffee -- and if it's too small and there wasn't enough room on top for the foam to foam up freely, then, accordingly, decrease the amount while keeping the proportions. To me it sounded as though it might be too big. If you tell me its capacity and shape, I can probably give you the adjusted amounts to use toward perfection.

Actually I've been reading up on assorted hidden esoteric traditions of the Western world and according to these, something does go to heaven -- the Milky Way is called "the road of the souls" and is thought of as a kind of interdimensional highway comprised of billions of souls en route to their transit points and destinations. "Death" is also a real entity, introduced by the god of Saturn (aka Satan), and the souls that have degraded badly take a turn toward this destination, which is not a final stop either, since it's the "door into chaos" and from there, into "inner chaos" that still might harbor a chance for rebirth if and when elsewhere in the cosmos conditions become favorable for those souls in deep lifeless nothingness. Might take a while though, whereas the ones that take the road toward other destinations have much more interesting experiences in heaven. Many wind up back on Earth, after a few adventures. Others blaze some other routes... e.g., currently quite a few enter the inner realm of Jupiter via one of its moons -- there's cosmic work to do and incarnating or not is part of what you are qualified to work on. Non-incarnation of a qualified soul, which eventually turns you into the light of the sun and merges you with its seven spirits, is not the end of the story either, because the sun (the outcome of the majority of souls on a given planet having undergone the transformation, and the rest having been expelled to start over) will then eject a planetary system similar to ours, becoming the womb of a new life-bearing world. You wind up either on an inhabited planet of such a world or stay with the sun, depending on a bunch of factors. The visible (yang) sun is only a reflection of the real sun of a world though, which is invisible, much like the real human is invisible. And so on. It gets interesting...

Oh, and this reminds me -- one thing I forgot to mention is that the work I've done reupholstering the sofa after our cat clawed through the fabric is not industrial strength after all. Gotta have to ask the cat to exercise caution.

Why put off the most important things till you've run out of time?

Water bath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain-marie Soup from dry herb: not recommended. Fresh nettles (spring is the good time for them, later in the season they become a bit coarse) can be cooked the way you would cook spinach. Blanching is suggested by some recipes -- boil them for 1 or 2 minutes, drain, wash with cold water, then chop for the dish you're making, removing the coarse stems which are too fibrous to eat. This takes the bite out of the leaves, and also removes any dirt or sand stuck to them. Then you cook them in broth or water for about 15 minutes, on simmer, with whatever additional ingredients you desire -- e.g. rice or potatoes, onions, etc.. Here's one recipe: http://localfoods.about.com/od/spring/r/NettleSoup.htm

Only nothing does nothing at all, like skiing downhill in the nude

^ So, what's it all about and, more importantly, where's my bowl of milk?..

According to some teachings (e.g. Eleusinian mysteries of Greece), difficult lifetimes are also a choice your greater spirit has made when deciding on the circumstances for its next incarnation. I used to hate this line of ideation with a passion because I thought all it was about was the powerless in denial trying to convince themselves and/or others that they have the power, the deprived of free will pretending they are not. What convinced me at least halfway that this might indeed be the case though is my own choice of difficult cultivation practices in this life. Very difficult sometimes, hard on the body, hard on the mind, occasionally devastating or horrifying or demanding beyond capacity. Yet I know that I, the me of this-here life, have indeed chosen them myself, strangely enough -- toward something I value more than the immediate gratification of taking it easy and seeking comfort and minimizing the effort. So why, was I thinking all of a sudden, why can't this be the case with my higher self too? Can't she have chosen an extremely high-stress incarnation toward a similar non-obvious non-instant-gratification goal of hers, on her own level of tasks and methods of accomplishing them?.. Have you ever thought of it this way?

In the early human traditions (retained to this day by, e.g., African shamanism), reincarnation was not only an absolutely universal belief but an uplifting, joyous one. A sentient being's indestructible ability to reincarnate and live again was thought of as the main thing to look forward to after death. The reward for good deeds was reincarnating close to your own people, your own land, back to the place in previous life that was so good to you. The punishment for wrongdoings was to reincarnate into foreign lands where nothing resonates with your soul's familiar theme and melody, and where no one has ever known or loved you. That was like starting life from scratch with no memory of the prior ones, and it was not as bad as to fail to reincarnate altogether (this punishment was retained for the absolutely evil only), but not as good as to be born in the same settlement where you lived out the years of your previous life in harmony with your kin. Taoism retains many echoes of this mindset. As Zhuangzi put it, "what will the great mother make me next? A rat's liver perhaps? Great! Where can she take me where it isn't good?.." Life wasn't thought of as suffering until it was made so... Those who made it into suffering, ennui, meaningless and exhausting using-up of people turned "resources," "work forces," "armed forces" and other functional units of dehumanization, crafted religions for the masses to go with the new human condition they superimposed. These religions invariably devalued human life and human experience. If life is posited as suffering, illusion, or the result of past transgressions, this should exhaustively explain to you why you're working 18 hours a day for pennies, why your children go hungry, why you are forced or brainwashed to fight wars that don't seem to work out all that great toward your own or anyone else's happiness, and on and on. But if you do all this while believing that it's the default state of affairs brought about by incarnating, you won't question authority, instead you will question the value of life itself and conclude that it is not worth seeking a different framework for, not worth wrenching back from the usurpers and humanizing again. Which is exactly what the overlords want you to conclude.

I'm going so fast Pacific Coast Highway morphs into autobahn.

If you are sincere, I can! Your error is not yours alone, it is very common. It is the misunderstanding of the concept "spiritual." Most people believe that it means warm-fuzzy, benevolent, sensitive, with some interest in things esoteric or occult. What it really means is "in direct two-way communication with spirits, deities and other disembodied, non-incarnated or no-longer-incarnated entities of dimensions and levels of reality different from our material world." This is the classic and much more narrow definition of what "spiritual" means, and in this sense, few people today are spiritual, even though the vast majority were in the remote past. If you like the idea of becoming truly spiritual, you need a teacher -- of esoteric practices, of lineage taoism, of lineage shamanism and the like. These are the ones who can either transmit a spiritual lineage (i.e. an array of spirits and deities with particular affinity to this particular tradition, who will know you after you have been introduced to them, and communicate with you if you are of further interest to them and express interest in such communication yourself, by methods taught in the tradition.) Or they can deem you non-spiritual material and refuse such transmission. In ether scenario you win, by not wasting your time on trying to do or be what's not "you" OR, alternatively, not doing what IS. They are facilitators of destiny-- they don't create it for you but they help you realize and actualize your very own. Does it help at all?

Yes. The technical term is an infusion -- you pour boiling water over the leaves and then let them sit for 20-30 minutes, whereupon you strain off the liquid, making sure to press it out of the herb too. Discard the herb, drink the liquid. Another method, if you feel like making a "proper" infusion, is a water bath. This results in a more complete extraction of the medicinal principles. I know from experience though that for anything you do regularly, one might tend toward the quicker method. The leaves themselves are edible but palatable only when fresh, you'd have a hard time with the dry ones. The traditional way to use fresh nettles is in a soup, pureed and seasoned with butter, sour cream, a few other herbs (chives, fennel, dill) and a sliced boiled egg. Quite yummy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24178570

I wouldn't know about the philosophy of an anti-philosophical stance since I've never assumed it. My stance is non-philosophical rather than anti-philosophical. A non-philosophical stance is like a non-Single Whip stance in taiji when you assume the Snake Creeping Down stance, i.e. the stance you ARE assuming is not denying the stance you are NOT assuming, you are just doing what the moment in spacetime has led you to doing, not in order to invalidate something else but in order to do what is timely and meaningful, to the beat of your ability. When the time comes for the Single Whip, you go through that, if you want to stop and meditate there, why not? -- but nothing in your microcosm or your macrocosm is threatened by your not getting petrified there forever. If you are alive and responsive, you don't assume a philosophical or any other stance and just stay there -- that, you do if you are a marble statue (no offense to the marble-headed among us). Ever wondered why most philosophers of yesteryear are made of marble now? But not the spirits of the eight directions, not the stars of the nine palaces, not the qi of the five phases -- nor animal helpers of the shamans, nor the rains they called or sent away, nor the rhythm of the drum they used for the purpose -- and most importantly, not the tao?..