Taomeow

I tend to believe Edgar Cayce on this one -- he asserted that karma is not just individual but collective, and you have to pay for (or balance out, whichever terminology you prefer) what members of your family, social class, gender, age group, country, nation, religion, race, species have done to members of other families, social classes, gender, age groups, countries, nations, religions, races, species. If you take a good hard clear historically accurate look at that kind of math, you've calculated 99% of your karma. The rest, your own minor transgressions, is easy to amend. But try amending the destruction of 99% of indigenous people everywhere... Karma to the rescue.

I have a dozen versions, but you probably mean this one: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Ching-Oracle-Complete-Concordance/dp/1905857055/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366938525&sr=1-2&keywords=i+ching+eranos

Here's one of the greatest instances of ganying in my family. My mom was 8 when WWII came to Russia, and the nazi troops were about to take the town where the family lived when the authorities ordered evacuation of civilians. My grandparents were scheduled to stay until the last moment and the last train and be evacuated together with the personnel of their respective places of work, while all children of the personnel, including my mom, were put on the first train going east. There was much chaos. Bombs were falling, tracks were damaged, schedules and any access to any reliable information as to which train goes where became temporarily nonexistent. Plans were being changed, so when my grandparents boarded their train three days later, they had no idea whether they would arrive in the same spot as their daughter or wind up totally elsewhere. In the meantime, days of stop and go travel later, at a brief ("ten minutes!") stop in the middle of nowhere, my mom decided that she wanted to get some hot water (available at stations) for the tea, took a kettle and got off the train so as to fill it up. At exactly this moment, another train stopped at the next track, and a woman got off, kettle in hand. Who just happened to be her aunt, my grandmother's sister. The aunt had up-to-date (three days fresher) information about my grandparents' destination, which indeed was nowhere near where my mom's train was headed, and she was traveling in that direction herself, having changed trains many times in the process, so as to be able to joint them on arrival. My mom returned the kettle and got on the other train with her aunt. Within a few days, everybody was reunited.

Some better science has been posted in the Bigu and taoist low carb thread -- post # 13. Enzymes break down everything -- starches, proteins and fats. This explains nothing really. Whether you have an addiction to wheat or not, I don't know -- when I used to eat it, I did. Most people do. It is addictive by design, due to the mechanism I described. It is damaging to the intestinal lining, the cartilage of the joints, the immune system and the brain, not because of the starches (sugar is sugar, wheat has plenty, it merely does what all sugars do), but because of gluten. This is a protein in wheat and grains related to wheat, and this is what causes damage to your intestinal lining, cartilage of the joints, immune system, the brain and more. This is what the body releases internal feel-good drugs in response to. Now then, normal natural wheat used to contain 2-4% protein, but it was selectively bred for higher content "to improve nutritional value" and currently we're dealing with species that have 20-24% protein. Gluten is of the same root as "glue" -- it attaches to things (the term is agglutination, gluing and clumping together). Its structure closely mimics that of some very ancient viruses, strangely enough, which is why the immune system reacts to its presence by attacking whatever tissues it attaches to and goes for to destroy them. (Gluten has a particular affinity to the joints cartilage, among other things, which is why most arthritis out there, as well as most other "autoimmune disorders" are the direct reaction to gluten consumption. Human remains showing signs of arthritis first appear in Egypt at the same time they started agricultural practices. There's no human bones showing the affliction in non-agricultural burials. The bogus explanation we've all been fed is that "they didn't live long enough to develop arthritis." Duh. They just didn't live unhealthy enough to have damaged their bones to the extent that aging becomes a structural feature of the skeleton. They died with young bones inside them at any age. The stretches to explain away things that don't sit well with our accepted model have been staggering throughout our history of medicine. E.g., in the 18th and 19th centuries, anatomy books medical students studied asserted that mercury is the natural constituent of the human bones, because no autopsy ever showed bones that didn't have it. That was because mercury concoctions were prescribed by doctors as routinely and liberally as today people might take an aspirin. Calomel, a mercury-containing syrup, was given to all children for all colds and coughs, e.g.., beginning in infancy and spanning a lifetime. Our "life sciences" are funny this way...) What about grains that don't contain gluten -- e.g. rice? They have their own problems, of which the first one is that gluten-containing grains consumption often results in cross-sensitivities, i.e. anything that has structurally similar components will be reacted to by our immune system that has been jerked into action day in and day out and loses the ability to make finer distinctions. Corn, which is technically not gluten-containing, typically causes exactly the same reactions in people with explicit gluten intolerance as wheat. Dairy, ditto! We're dealing with the devil here, really... the great deceiver.

All ideas about the enjoyment of natural things being somehow wrong originate with the overlords brainwashing the slaves. Who wants slaves with needs?.. Who cares what they enjoy?.. They should be told what to enjoy and what to feel guilty about enjoying. Who needs slaves with free will? With discerning senses? With experience of what it's really like to be human?.. By the way, food that is not enjoyed is not doing one much good. Scientific fact. Certain neurochemicals that are released when food is enjoyed are crucial to proper digestion. (We have more receptors for neuroendocrine hormones in the gut than in the brain.) If the food is eaten but not enjoyed, the body "reads" this as an assault to endure and mitigate, and releases internal painkillers, endogenous opiates and even LSD-like substances to blunt the pain of food punishment. This means that people who eat without enjoying their food effectively turn into junkies for internal drugs. These internal drugs are as addictive as street drugs, mutagenic, teratogenic, carcinogenic, and damaging to the DNA. Keep this in mind before going after that bland boring plate of what you think you "should" eat because it's "good for you." All grains, incidentally, are perceived by the body in this manner -- the ancient metabolic message of grain-eating is read as "starvation, must try to get nourishment from whatever is available, since real food is not there." Hence their addictiveness. You get addicted to your internal feel-good drugs triggered by your chronic grains consumption. This is the wrong kind of enjoyment of food. Real enjoyment is simple -- you have, as my paleo guru puts it, two modes vis a vis food -- "hungry" and "not hungry." If you eat for any other reason, you are feeding an addiction. If you feel worse off after the meal instead of better, e.g. get sluggish, sleepy, wired up, bloated, heavy, or if you feel good for an hour after eating and then are hungry again, or if you never have an appetite and eat just because you have to, etc., chances are your food is a Trojan horse you let in.

There's a Chinese story. An empress, returning home to the capital from a trip, was caught in inclement weather and something or other happened that got her and her attendants stranded, don't remember what it was -- a flood, perhaps, or a heavy snowfall. A farmer's house was the only place they chanced upon in the middle of it. Cold and tired, the empress decided to spend the night there. The farmer, kowtowing, apologized for his poverty and the whole setting not worthy of the high guests, but the empress protested with a smile, "Oh, this is the most cozy little house, the fire of your stove is so warm and cheerful, and what your wife is cooking smells good -- do give us something to eat. I'm curious to try peasant food." The farmer and his wife served the empress a bowl of soup. She tried it and opened her eyes wide in sheer amazement. "This is the best soup I've ever had in my life." She ordered her attendants to get the exact recipe. Savoring every spoonful and then the seconds, the empress, now warm and relaxed and satisfied, went to sleep. The next day the sun was shining brightly, and she continued on her journey. Arriving at last, she was served a lavish banquet dinner at the palace, but after sampling everything, she announced, "I want that peasant soup." The soup was promptly prepared. She tried it. "No, it's not right. Something is missing." The imperial cooks tried again and again and the empress was not satisfied with the results. "The farmer must have kept an ingredient secret. Go get him and find out what he's hiding." The farmer was brought to the palace. "My cooks tried to make that soup of yours, but you must have left out some information about the recipe. A secret ingredient perhaps? A family secret, closely guarded? Well, you have to reveal it now if you want to keep your head." The farmer, terrified out of his mind, muttered, "Yes, your majesty, there is one ingredients that your cooks left out. But they don't have it. It's you and only you who can add it to the soup..." "What is it?" "Your majesty... Hunger."

Like an Italian opera singer?.. There's not many skinny opera stars. The richness of the art demands the richness of the senses -- and because it is executed via the mouth, it's the mouth that has to have a rich sensual life. So that, you know, it knows what it's talking about when expressing complex and substantial emotions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPvAQxZsgpQ

They're a British thing, those Maidenhead green-eyed lads you frack in LA

nevermind, as soon as I wrote it I understood it.

Don't disagree with an altar in your heart proposed by Mythmaker either. Or with Sree's plan to worship beauty, art, music, friendship. Altar-making comes naturally to some people -- I never realized that I was always making them until some book or other pointed it out. As a kid, I would put together a handful of pebbles that I found interesting, and later a small collection of minerals, and treat them as sacred objects -- the minerals were emotionally charged too, I got them one by one from my dad when he returned from his frequent and sometimes long business trips, the minerals were from the Ural mountains and there's folk legends and fairy tales about guardians of treasures living there... the Lady of the Copper Mountain, the Silver Hoof... but I digress. It wasn't unusual for me, at the age of 4, to bury a dead butterfly together with fresh flowers (to provide nourishment in the underworld!) or to decide that my grandmother's cat (who was older and much wiser than me) was only disguised as a cat and transformed into her extraordinary incarnations whenever she left for the night. (I still believe it.) Favorite books, paintings, music, poetry -- anything could turn sacred on me. None of it was taoism though. With taoist practices, I try to keep it pretty orthodox, with as little innovation as possible. This is in line with my overall understanding of the nature of reality -- to wit, that one has to look as far back as she can for to see what's real. I'm not easily impressed by advanced cultivation of the artificial. Nature impresses me, people who follow nature impress me... but those who try to lead her instead of follow... not so much, to say the least. Sorry for the ramblings.

Just for the record, I didn't say that. Not that I disagree.

Thank you. I would suggest you do some planning and take care of some preliminaries before proceeding to the actual altar making. When I start thinking about what to suggest to a philosophical taoist, I can't help feeling that philosophical taoism does not prepare one for anything but a bunch of ways to process thoughts. This is a process that is routinely ignored by other realms, so if you want to initiate a relationship with those, you would have to do it in a way they notice. Specifically, you need a practice that gives you a measure of control of your qi and shen. Taoist ritual work (with the exception of offerings to the ancestors) is not done by people who haven't undergone some cultivation. They don't have to be priests, but they have to be able to focus their intent, settle their qi, quiet their mind, nourish their spirit... all that jazz. If you have never done qigong, taoist meditation, or some such, I would start there and get to the altar part later. Please don't take it the wrong way. I base this assertion on what I've been taught and my own experience. E.g., you need to raise inner shields. How do you go about it without an experience of an internal practice? I have no idea. People like to imagine things, but if you want your interactions with the nonordinarly realms (and your protection against intrusions) to be efficient, imagination is not enough -- you need some control of your subtle energies, and some experience perceiving them and recognizing which ones are yours and which ones come from different people and things as well as domains and entities beyond people and things... that's basic safety. Does it make sense so far? If this is not something you are ready to look into and want an altar as a focusing point of your "taoist evolution," I would suggest an ancestral altar for starters. You install tablets with the names of the deceased direct ancestors (the modern way allows to use photographs), place a red candle on each side, an incense burner, and before you eat your dinner, offer some food on the altar. You light the candles and the incense, place the food, water and wine (if you're having that) in front of the tablets, bow, and after a few minutes you can complete the ritual by bowing again, extinguishing the candles, and removing the food. It can be eaten by the living after this, it is not thrown away. If you make a habit of doing this on a regular basis, this is the beginning of learning the basics of discipline associated with any taoist practice. This will take you right out of the philosophical taoism into empirical taoism -- which is a change of pace you are looking for, right?

Of course. This practice is known as "making idols."

To each their own. Lavender is great for scenting your bed linens. Rosemary, however, is one of the exorcist's tools. Be careful.

All right, so then, let's start building it step by step. I have three altars -- two permanent and one that I installed to do a specific seasonal meditation. The permanent ones are the ancestral one and the "all-purpose" one. The ancestral one is simple and requires no protection. The seasonal comes complete with a protective device consecrated and charged by the master. The all-purpose one you install yourself needs to be protected. The reason is that an altar is not a simple affair (unless it is for decorative purposes only). A functional altar is a door to other realms. When you activate it, you open that door. Do you know exactly what/who is on the other side?.. Protection of the altar space is the first and crucial rule. There are dozens of types of shields that are used, and the deeper the immersion into the nonordinary realms, the more protection you may need. Err on the side of caution. I've heard hundreds of stories about unwanted intrusions via practices that neglected this aspect. So my advice to you would be, research protective measures first. (You can search this site for Yoda's altar -- Yoda was a taobum who became initiated by a rather controversial taoist who supposedly helped him with his protective talismans after a practice he was engaged in brought in uninvited entities. The source of the entities may be subject to some debate -- Yoda believed they came from the practice, I believe the practice brought them out from the inner realms -- but that's beside the point, if you don't want to deal with them or don't know how, that's more than understandable. You want to get rid of them, period. So, one of the things Yoda did when he joined that controversial taoist to study with him was install an altar... We have pictures linked somewhere on this site, do check it out... This is a bit extreme. But he'd been burned, so it's, again, understandable. Better safe than sorry... )

OK, then the next question is, how are you going to consecrate and protect it? You have to either have an initiated taoist do it for you, or you have to learn the drill. Do you know a drill?

New Taoist, the arrangement of the taoist altar depends on what you are going to use it for. Generally there's two types -- the ancestral altar, used to make offerings to the deceased relatives (usually only immediate family), and the ritual/ceremonial altar, used for ritual/ceremonial work, magic, divinations, offerings to the gods, and holiday celebrations.

Another pearl comes out of ChiDragon's favorite sack of pearl barley.

I've often suffered from knee nag. Didn't have a name this elegant for the phenomenon though (thank you MM and PLB) -- my working title for this has been "the almost-there f...-up." (There's a Russian slang idiom for this too which is strange but expressive and refers to events that should have happened but didn't--"flying over and past it like plywood over Paris.")

There's many ways to read dreams -- they've always been considered important (or rather have always been divided into important and unimportant ones) by original cultures, and some have come up with elaborate classifications. Taoism, in particular. There were taoist researchers and theorists of dreaming since antiquity. One way they classified dreams was into passive (the more prevalent variety) and active (which is a cultivated skill), symbolic and direct, and ordinary and extraordinary. (There's quite a few more categories and subdivisions, and way more than in taoism, in hinduism.) Extraordinary dreams were always regarded as meaningful and analyzed from several perspectives. The context of the dream itself, the mental and emotional state of the dreamer were one part of the reading; the outer conditions were another -- astrological antics of the stars, the moon phase, qi phases of the day/night (Wuxing), any synchronistic events, it could get pretty involved. They say that interpreting an I Ching reading is a bit like interpreting a dream -- well, the opposite is also true, a dream is sometimes a divinational tool that elucidates the past, the present, and/or the future, guides, warns, promises, sets a task -- you may want to spend some time with its images and everything else I mentioned above for the meaning (often with more dimensions to it than one) to crystallize out of the fog. When I get an extraordinary dream, it sometimes takes years for all its implications to play themselves out, and for some there's a distinct sense that they're still unfinished business. But then, you are the judge of how extraordinary this dream is for you. Some people have complex, involved, convoluted dreams every night but they are not extraordinary for them, they are business as usual and reflect the state of their unconscious, pointing it out with persistence till something is done about it. Others don't get any dreams if there's nothing their unconscious needs to point out to them because they already know it all and have done what could be done to date about it. I, e.g., am not prone to passive ordinary dreams, and usually only dream if/when there's something I need and CAN do about something.

The Chens gave Chen taiji to the West very very recently. They all grew up in China -- not Taiwan, not Hong Kong, not Singapore. You have to look from the historic perspective to know why none of them could/would be practitioners of taoist religion. Taoist religion was exterminated where they come from. A revival came later, and in a fashion similar to "Egyptian" architecture of Washington and Philadelphia. Communist functionaries appointed to serve as taoist priests and monks. Mobility and exposure to the outside world, likewise, came later. Whatever they do today "business wise" they learned from us. That's one thing we're good at teaching -- how to turn everything into a business. If you have something real and valuable and unique, and turn it into a business, that's far superior in my book to having something bogus or superfluous and turning that into a business. And, honestly, I don't know how "who deserves what" is decided by the higher powers, but Chen village is proverbial for its poverty (the saying goes something like, "merciful gods, save us from the demons of the underworld and the fields of Chen village"). The Four Tigers lived through a long stretch of time when they couldn't afford even a bicycle -- even ONE bicycle to share -- so any later business success, if anyone begrudges them, is begrudged on a basis I honestly can't comprehend.

Taijiquan is not "is" taoism, it is, however, a beneficiary of the application of taoist principles to an activity (much like 72 other disciplines discussed in the Taoist Canon that are not "taoism" by themselves but can and historically have been approached from the basis of taoist principles by taoists, and every which way by everybody else). The difference between the pseudomasters Shanlung describes and the real ones is not that the real ones don't use taoist principles in their art -- they do, and then some. The difference is that the real ones do not mention taoist principles and internal work of taijiquan to beginners. Not because they aren't aware of them or are not using them but because discussing them before the physical structure is in place (which takes a minimum of ten years with taijiquan) is like discussing calculus with math beginners who can count from one to ten but are yet to learn the multiplication table. (Math students also take about ten years from beginner to calculus, and "real" math only starts there.)

LInen, cotton, silk, hemp, bamboo, wool, leather, fur clothes breathe. Polyester, nylon, rayon (this starts out as natural fabric but is chemically infused and altered so it can hardly breathe anymore), polyvinyl chloride etc. don't and indeed suffocate your pores. Before going naked, consider re-evaluating your wardrobe from this POV. Mine has 1% synthetics (and even those are limited to lacey things so they breathe through the holes) and 99% natural materials. This is a quest made particularly hard for women -- women's clothes today are polyester galore. When I food shop at a supermarket, I go as I would through a jungle in search of food, quickly marking off 99% of everything in the environment: "not food... not food... not food... " My clothes shopping trips are similar -- polyester textures are the environment, the jungle: "not clothes... not clothes... not shoes..." What I'm looking for is hiding somewhere in the jungle, and I look for that, disregarding whatever pretends to be that but isn't. It's like foraging for mushrooms -- you don't take the poisonous ones just because they look similar to the edible ones and can be mistaken for the latter.

Most of our history happened during Ice Age. There's many things about us that are, genetically speaking, a lie. What happened to our fur? There's no other naked ape in existence. What happened to our tail? How can a species that vigorously explores and expands its environment suddenly "not need" a tail which could be so handy... um, taily... for this specific lifestyle?.. Why are our teeth and claws so useless in the natural world? Normal animals fight with their faces. We fight a helluva lot more than all animals combined, but we "need" tools. What about menstruation -- what is this biological innovation for, no one else does this because bleeding in a natural setting routinely attracts carnivorous predators? What about continuous ready-willing-able vis a vis sex -- all animals have limited and distinct periods of sexual activity, "libido" is not an indefinite continuity in any natural species. What about hair on the head that doesn't stop growing with maturity -- ever seen a lion who needs a haircut? What about the loss of ability to produce vitamin C in our bodies? What happened to that, why would we lose it if we didn't lose the need for it? What about the... OK, the biggie: All primates, apes, hominids, neanderthals, cro-magnons have 48 (24 pairs) chromosomes. Humans (Homo sapiens) have 46 (23 pairs). There is no natural way for this to have happened -- and here's what happened: 1) "Evolution" from ape to human "lost" two chromosomes (1 pair). 2) Chromosomes 2 and 3 fused together into one long doubled-up chromosome. (If two chromosomes fewer doesn't sound drastic, consider the fact that dolphins have 2 chromosomes fewer than humans--the difference this produces is pretty radical. I don't know where dolphins stand in relation to whatever they are supposed to have "evolved" from. But humans do seem to stand in a genetically impossible place that could never happen naturally.)