Taomeow

Methinks this thread is for General rather than Taoist discussion.

Most people can't tell you're the empress of the world when you dress so plain

Do you know who paid for the study? I never believe studies of natural proven substances of long standing and a long history of safe use paid for by pharmaceutical companies that stand to lose profits to cheap non-patentable superior-safety superior-efficiency goodies they don't own. Tainted evidence, is what I call these. Where I come from B-6 was prescribed by MDs in injections, pretty often, as a general tonic, immune booster, mild antidepressant, energy and stamina booster for people with an assortment of chronic illnesses, to counteract deficiency in people who didn't absorb it well from dietary sources (e.g. my mom, who had dozens of courses because of a chronic digestive tract disorder), as an adjunct to the treatment that was supposed to halt the beginning of myopia in children, for neuromuscular disorders, the list goes on and on. It was one of the most widely prescribed "let's do something if we aren't sure what else to do" interventions, usually in a combo with B-12 injections and sometimes aloe extract injections, and it usually helped. I got a couple of courses myself, knew many others who did, and have never heard of any adverse effects, except the injection is painful as hell.

*** Pre-Mao pu-ehr tea. Over seventy years old, fresh tasting, blood red. *** His aunt is a witch from Grenoble, she skis, taijis and talks to the dead. *** A huge beetle flies in with his engine running loud, jump-starting my cat

All deeper considerations aside, vitamin B-6 deficiency interferes with dream recall. Take it on a regular basis half an hour before going to bed and you may see an improvement. It is safe to take MUCH higher doses than the RDA, so experiment with what works for you. For synergistic effects, make sure you take a multi-B with this too. Good luck.

where's my "as" in "as dan quayle once said," you four-syllable haiku rebel?

Positive future will look better tomorrow, as Dan Quayle once said.

With a foe unseen, declare War on any noun -- for instance, "terror."

*** The tunnel, the train, the plane crashing into that, the alarm clock... Dream... *** Birds of paradise Hushed garden of evermore Amber persimmons

Incredibly right is our right wing, and our left, incredibly right

*** Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad *** O say can you see, by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed... *** God save our gracious Queen, live long our noble Queen, God save the Queen! Riff!

It has steadily been my experience with the I Ching that there's usually a whole fractal of meanings to a particular answer she gives, applicable to a whole fractal of situations. If you use the oracle for divination (i.e. the way it was used traditionally for thousands of years), you may get answers up and down the octave from your question, pertaining to bigger and smaller issues than the one you asked about but resonating harmoniously with the overall theme. Example: "I divine traveling to New York in October" may give me something like "southwest is lucky, northeast is blocked" -- which will cause me to try to figure out if northeast is blocked in October specifically, and the answer may be "I told you once, I won't tell you twice, stop bothering me." And that same day I will get stuck in bad traffic going to Encinitas, which is a ten-minute drive northeast away from me, and later that day get an invitation to a sushi outing from a friend in La Jolla, southwest. So this will show me that the fractal of "northeast is blocked" extends to its smaller here-now resonances as well, not just New York in October, and I will wait to ask the question again later, when the stars have moved and the qi of the time has changed. So, Panda didn't ask the question but she got the answer without asking, and it's now about figuring out which question or questions this was the answer to (if the immortal was a traditionalist rather than a new ager, he will honor the traditional way to use the I Ching I am sure). In my experience, it may be, like I said, not an answer to one particular question but a whole octave or even a whole symphony of meanings pertaining to all the resonating situations of similar nature and quality of qi. So, it could be very useful to grasp the climate and flavor, feeling and meaning, nature and quality of this message, and then keep checking situations that arise in real life and/or in the mind against its tuning fork, noticing the resonances.

How cool is that! This is a good hexagram unless you get an inauspicious changing line, which I don't think you did. There's only one old yang in hexagram 16 (in the upper trigram), and the words "in winter old yang becomes yin" indicate that this line was pointed out to you as the changing line. It is a good one by itself, and the hexagram derived from this change, number 2, is all good, and indeed all yin and associated with winter. The overall reading suggests getting prepared for a project (you know better than I which one, or else will know soon enough). The best time to initiate it, with due preparations, is between winter and spring. As for "daughter under mountain" -- this is really interesting, because the sage couldn't have referred to the Zhouyi arrangement of the I Ching, maybe he meant the Earlier Heaven arrangement, I'll have to take a look. In the Later Heaven arrangement, this hexagram may be read as "daughter under mountain" only if flipped over (or read top to bottom instead of bottom to top)! This refers both to the actual trigrams and the nuclear trigrams. If you flip it, nuclear ones will then be fire (Li) over earth (a small earth trigram, Ken -- mountain), which is indeed a mother-daughter relationship (fire produces earth). And similarly, if you read the actual trigrams upside down, they give you a female (though Kun usually means mother rather than daugter, but your sage didn't specify "youngest daughter," "middle daughter" or "eldest daughter," either one of which would point out a particular different trigram, so perhaps he meant "female" in general) under mountain. I couldn't figure out a way to read Hexagram 16 as "daughter under mountain" straight up in the modern arrangement (believe me, I tried ). Of course to an immortal a few thousand years of a different arrangement may seem as a modern fad... too new, something to be skeptical about...

"One breath in, one out," she said, "there's no other way back from death to life."

The Bible does not lie, the interpretations and purposeful mistranslations do. E.g., it starts out as a truthful astrological polytheistic text -- the elohim created this and that -- "elohim" is not "god," it's "the gods," plural. It proceeds to say, not "He created the male and the female" but, "male and female they created him," i.e. Adam was created hermaphroditic by the gods. And so it goes. They mix Satan the Saturn and Lucifer the Venus into one, as though they are the same deal. Not even remotely!! And line by line by line they tell you fairy tales, but in such a way that if you know many other tales, if you are an insider to these, you'll get it. If you don't, no chance in heaven or on earth. As a cabalistic text put it, "She reveals and conceals Her light" -- simultaneously...

Breaths of hexagrams! This blue robe with scarlet clouds longs to dance with you.

All religions have the same original source -- what really happened. According to the teachings of the Mystery Schools (encoded in all modern religions in a form that can't be understood by a regular practitioner, but invariably there -- yup, in Christianity too), what really happened was the coming of the savior a long, long time before religions of any sort. The savior was the Sun god, the saved party Mother Earth, the oppressor, Saturn. This drama has been re-enacted many, many times, in various re-castings. Jesus, incidentally, is one of a succession of the Sun gods briefly participating in this re-enactment in the past two thousand years. The "what really happened" has always been in the past AND the future simultaneously. As one of my favorite sci-fi shows, Battlestar Galactica, put it, "it all happened before, and it will all happen again."

Freddie had it all... but did it help him meet the main objective of this song?..

Ah, very good! Definitions vary through ages and traditions, but I would say kairos is an aspect of chronos which corresponds to the yi of the Yi Jing ( which is spelled here the Pinyin way to differentiate from the personal pronoun "I" it can otherwise be mistaken for in the Wade-Giles and more widespread spelling of the I Ching). "Yi" or kairos is "a kind of time," "the weather of the times," with a beginning and an end, and a transition to a different kind, a different cosmic moment. Apparently the authors of the Yi Jing understood its nature similarly, i.e. as times acted upon, not the regular changes of the unfolding of the cosmic process but the kind of changes in the motor of the cosmic time machine you can cause by throwing in a monkey wrench. Some traditions view this monkey wrench as "the mind of god in action, at the time chosen," others, as the mind of goddess impeded, her machinery of life eternal split into irregular and haphazard attempts at Conception, Growth, Fruition -- and artificially skewed toward Consummation... Fruitful subject!

Which things do you have in mind, Friend? I'm talking about the servants of the Dark Lord, Kronos, Saturn, Lord of the Rings, Ptah, to name a few of his names. They have served him from the beginning of time (something he provides -- the "beginning" of time, by introducing the "end of time," death.) Whatever technology they use today can be fought alchemically to the same extent it has always been fought alchemically. Lead, the Dark Lord's element, can always be transformed into pure gold, no matter what they make out of it. It's a matter of knowing how.

Nice fix, CT! Celebrate contrast! Finnish sauna, then dive in Adirondack snow* (*true story)

I was buying something yesterday and as I paid and turned to leave, the sales person called after me, "Do you want your keys?" Turned out I left them on the counter. Some people do it all the time -- I had a friend I used to hang out with who would have to go back to wherever we were before to retrieve his keys, wallet, sunglasses, hat, something -- whatever it was that he had, more than half the time he left it behind. (I kept telling him that it's psychologically significant -- he's unconsciously "trying to lose something.") Well, I never do that. Hardly ever. Never say never. But it's not a habit with me. Habitually, I scan any point A for whatever personal items I might be leaving behind before moving on to point B. So, the sales woman told me, "you are the third person in the last hour who did that. Left the keys on the counter and walked away." Aha! So now I knew it was not an accident. It was... but wait, let me give you another example. My ex was cutting some hard cheese and cut into his finger almost to the bone. The bleeding was far in excess of what you see with a routine kitchen mishap, the kitchen looked as though he'd been trying to slaughter a bull rather than cut cheese there, so we decided to go to the ER. The finger indeed proved to need a few stitches, and as the doctor was administering them, the nurse casually mentioned to me, "today is the cut fingers day. Number five, this one. No wait, number six." What?.. "Is it something you see every day -- five or six patients coming in with this particular trauma?" No. But sometimes, when they start coming, particular types of traumas come in clusters. "Saturday is the cut-across-the-palm morning." Why? "Bagels. They get up and go get fresh bagels from the bakery and bring them home to the family, and then they try to slice the bagel while holding it in their hands." OK, that's understandable, at least there's a sequence I can discern, a reason for a cluster. But cut fingers on a random week day? "Were all the cut fingers kitchen mishaps?" "No, all different circumstances." "Any palms, thumbs, other cut body parts today?" "No, just fingers. Six people, six cut fingers, all from different accidents." This, folks, is ganying, the mysterious resonance that causes seemingly unrelated events to happen simultaneously. Most of the time you see them as unrelated because you don't see the larger and subtler picture. But they are related. How?.. It's like the weather. When it rains on Avenue A, chances are it also rains on Avenue B next to it. It's like sunshine. If it's sunny on Avenue A, chances are it's also sunny on Avenue B. But whatever happens to cause people to get "under the weather of cut fingers" is not as readily visible... And yet it's there. Have you ever seen "Magnolia?" I watched it a couple of times, a few years ago, and could never get over the fact that it was all about ganying -- like a textbook illustration...

No, I don't, unfortunately... so maybe I'll repost in a bit. In the meantime, saw this episode -- the driver was unharmed -- reminded me of a Castaneda account of the day he and Don Juan were on a mountain trail and Carlos stopped for a moment to tie his shoelaces, and that's when a huge boulder suddenly fell on the path where they would have been in a moment if he didn't stop. This is another side of the "knee nab" ganying, the almost-but-not-quite kind -- its brighter side. I've experienced this one too...

Dragon coils unseen, dragon jaws open wider: welcome to China

No rules, really. If it is something you want to do, do it. If you don't, no need to. I normally don't record anything as it just happens -- if it's still with me later, weeks or months or years later, that's when I write about it if I'm in the mood. If it hasn't lost its meaning to you in a long time, or ever, then you can write about it whenever you feel like it. If it did, which only time will tell, it wasn't worth writing about to begin with. The above pertains to ordinary tasks of writing stuff down, but not to the extraordinary uses of writing as a form of qigong (in traditional Chinese calligraphy, e.g.) or alchemy and/or magic (in talismanic calligraphy) or a healing routine that helps unblock the shen (via some techniques taught, e.g., in the longmen pai tradition), or part of a ritual that starts with writing and proceeds toward whatever purpose -- e.g. some sorcerers-for-hire in Hong Kong are fond of writing down a curse and then beating it with the client's shoe to potentiate it and direct it toward the recipient, and on and on. So, it all depends...