Taomeow

Taoism is not big on 'enlightenment.' We chop wood, carry water. We heal, exorcise, tell fortunes, arrange auspicious homes and graves, bless, fight, bring peace, do politics, do art, do science, do not-doing, roam the root of heaven and earth, stuff like that. We communicate with spirits and deities, ancestors and animals, trees and clouds. We gather the elixir, grow the Yellow Sprouts, set the bellows under the cauldron, mate the Tiger and the Dragon, nourish the immortal fetus. Most importantly, our 'true nature' is all of these, not something separate from what we're doing. We believe our true nature is a verb, not a noun. And our lineages are not 'academic,' they are 'a candle lit from a candle.'

Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation, by Peter Levenda

What you are talking about is "taoist schools and sects," a different animal from "lineages." There can be different lineages within the same school or sect, and there can be different schools and sects branching out from the same lineage. A lineage is dependent on sequential transmission. A school or sect isn't. You can joint anytime if you are found qualified or meet whatever requirements for joining. What you join is a school or sect, not a lineage. To become part of a lineage, you need to get the whole teachings of your school or sect transmitted to you and then transmit them to someone else.

One thing that always worries me when I see these discussions is how often people take a temporary therapeutic (or spiritual) dietary intervention designed toward a specific purpose and useful under certain conditions only, and then extrapolate its benefits to regular daily nutrition. The "one diet fits all" ideas may have been planted in everybody's unconscious by the establishment whose "pyramid" is supposed to be what "everybody" "at all times" is going to benefit from. Many deviate from the "pyramid," but few walk away from it -- they seem to just replace it with a pyramid of a different design... Diets are to be customized to bodies, lifestyles, states of health/unhealth, nutritional histories, nutritional goals, age, gender, different periods in the life of the same person, to say nothing about different persons. No man in his right mind will assume that the diet which facilitates fast and healthy growth and development, steady dramatic increase of muscle strength and brain size, and steady acquisition of new motor skills on a daily basis is to consist exclusively of human breast milk -- but that's exactly the perfect diet for his infant son which accomplishes all of the above and more. Yet so many people seem to believe that a perfect diet may be found that is perfect once and for all...

I'm going to make some of you ecstatically happy and some of you grudgingly miserable in a moment. (Imitating life, they call it.) Here goes: http://www.findaspring.com/ Through this site, I found a local source of deep artesian water (SoCal tap water is impossible to drink, unlike, e.g., water in NYC. Aside from all health considerations, some municipal water just tastes like punishment for our collective sins.) The artesian watering hole in our proximity provides absolutely the best water I've ever had in this country. It is unadulterated, nothing is done to it. I couldn't believe that I lived close to the source for a few years and didn't know it existed. It's a small private affair, they keep the price low for reasons I don't want to know so as not to jinx my luck (some of the sources I referenced above are outright free, or at least used to be the last time I looked), and I wish those of you who will try to locate a similar deal similar luck.

I would call it "modern western science." Division beyond 64 is not impossible, as you may have imagined me saying. No. Not impossible, merely imbecilic. It heralds fragmentation of processes (including the process of cognition, of comprehending reality) into so many parts that they can no longer find their relationship to each other, let alone their way back to their source. It's like studying a continuously exploding palace, with chairs, tables, vases, pictures, bricks, brick-a-bracks and what not flying in all directions, falling to the ground, being shaken by a new blast and flying into smaller, bigger, nano-fragments, fragments flying left, right, center, outer space, in more and more directions -- and then detonating more explosives so you can study more pieces, and again... and again... and then, when a pile of boxes with labels into which you collect those fragments is higher than the sun but no one knows how to get to the only one where what they're looking for is stored, deciding that what's needed is to split them some more, get more fragments, more thoroughly collected into more boxes and more elaborately labeled... and if that still doesn't satisfy, and it never does... um... let's study something really far out! -- let's not just explode it, let's nuke it!! Taoist sciences -- well, that's like studying a handmade one-story hut that has 64 features... a round hole for the smoke to come out, aligned with Polestar... a fireplace for cooking meals and elixirs, a well for drawing water that has no bottom, a pigsty with as many pigs as your family will need in a year plus one extra for Shangdi, a book shelf and a medicine cabinet... everything needed to make it complete, a complete microcosm reflecting accurately and precisely a complete macrocosm, whole, unbroken... and then nothing more. Once you have all you need, why overwhelm yourself, why get greedy?.. Who is being helped by a restless split-it-all monster fragmenting "things" (and lives!!) into a million, billion, quadrillion "red dust" particles?.. Not me, said the little taoist mouse in her little 64-feature mousehole inside the 64-feature house... ...

Taiji, aka yin and yang, split into tai yang, shao yin, shao yang, and tai yin. These, at the next step of division, form the bagua family, the eight trigrams. The eight trigrams combining in pairs form the 64 hexagrams. The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching is the maximal number of meaningful divisions within the cosmic process. The diagram I posted originally illustrates the dynamic process generating the eight trigrams, the Eight Directions, and the 64 hexagrams by the "rotational swimming of the fishes." If you go to a museum of ancient Chinese art, you will see similar patterns on many objects sometimes depicted as the actual fishes. They "spawn" all manifestations in this manner. Better?..

Here's a rather interesting fact for your consideration, folks: in our "great mother langauge," Indo-European, there was a word Bhleg, which meant "shine, burn, flush." When our languages separated into "ten thousand things," some of them interpreted the phenomenon it referred to as black and others as blanco -- white. You will find this bhleg all over Indo-European languages, sometimes meaning black and sometimes meaning white, sometimes meaning empty (blank) without a distinct assertion as to whether what's "blank" is black or white, and sometimes meaning blush -- redden! And remove from existence -- obliterate.

This diagram -- wuji to taiji to ten thousand things (and back, and back and forth, and so forth) was the focus of my meditations for a while, a few years ago. I would place it at eye level, sit in lotus, and look at it using a Dzogchen technique of "placing awareness in the eyes." Because it was the very first method of meditation I was taught, many moons ago, I didn't get rid of the technique when moving on to things taoist, inherently a lot more abstract... so this is still my basic technique for studying taoist "visual props" -- Hetu, Luoshu, the Circular I Ching, the pattern of movement of qi through the Nine Palaces, the images of constellations, the fu's, and anything else that is absolutely abstract in its true nature, but is taught to the beginner as a concrete image, a manifestation. You can't really draw an image of wiji or taiji, not in black, not in white, not in any color, because for starters wuji, tao-in-stillness, has no vibration and color is a vibration... Any image is a manifestation, but when you are trying to access the unmanifest, you use the taoist premise that the process goes both ways and "being comes from nonbeing" and "to grasp nonbeing, you depart from being." And then the magic of a stillness meditation is your tool to travel in that direction, from the concrete image back to its abstract origin, from awareness of a "picture" to pure awareness, from ten thousand things to taiji to wuji. So, if your meditation is deep and steady and takes you to the wuji state (which is the whole point of any stillness meditation, you have to embody what you are trying to access because there's no other way to access it), you "get it." As one side effect of this practice, I know that none of it can be "logically inferred" or "guessed at" -- although logic and guesswork enter the picture as soon as stillness ends and motion begins. The motion begins as separation, and it begins already logically, and circular-logcially at that, not mysteriously anymore -- for logic is born of mystery (and it is circular because" the Way of this motion is Return"). Yin sinks to the bottom and yang floats to the top, and that's why any two phenomena that have a top and a bottom, a higher and a lower, are yin and yang to each other; yin is heavy and yang is light, and that's why any two phenomena that have weight are yin and yang to each other once outside the realm of perfect equilibrium; yin is dark and yang is light because... and so on. So, among other things, the wuji state reveals the logic of the taiji state, but between the logic of the taiji state and the wuji state itself lies the mysterious border, miaotao, and there's no talking about what's beyond and there's no talking about what's ON the border either. So, the empty circle is drawn "empty" because that's a visual prop, not because it is empty, or white, or anything like that. It's none of these, and yet it's yin -- but you have already crossed the border back here, to the world of ten thousand things, to say "it's yin" -- and there's no way to say anything about it other than from "here," in the world of manifestations. Assessed from here, looked back at through the prism of the manifest, it is yin. It has all the attributes of yin, and Laozi did a superb job of writing a whole book about it. But you mustn't confuse the two (the generic "you" I mean). I.e. don't claim any knowledge of "there" from "here." Anything you might say, without having the knowledge of "there" from "there," is irrelevant. You know what "those who speak do not know" really means? It doesn't mean you "speak don't know," it means "speak or no speak, if you know I know that you know, if you don't know I know that you don't know."

Laozi's synonym for "tao" is "the great mother..." and since he is the great father of the term, I would take his word for it. You are onto something though, but it's not yin vs. yang as in female vs. male. Tao/mother is the kind of yin that contains yang as its aspect -- "yang embracing yin," they call it. (When you look at the diagram of wuji, traditionally represented as an empty circle... well, the outer circumference of that circle is its yang aspect, and everything inside is its yin aspect.) The aspects of yin power that are the closest to manifesting are the yang aspects of a yin power. As Castaneda's Don Juan put it, "maleness is rare in the universe because it is optional." Yin power may or may not put on a show of its power -- if she chooses not to, she won't manifest yang. Tao-in-stillness, wuji, is yin... Nonbeing is yin, the unmanifest is yin, the source is yin, the uncreated is yin. The first creative impulse -- that's yang. Thunder... It strikes, sets things in motion, dies. "The Valley Spirit never dies" is a reassurance that this process, the process of creation, does not affect the source. Tao is uncreated...

Thank you, SB. It's not unusual to formulate this goal first and have some circumstances come together to provide an opportunity later. Many of the most famous and accomplished taoists were late bloomers.

Far as I know, Zhengyi lineages are mostly familial and were traditionally centered around the actual genealogical tree and transmitted to family members, thus surviving many migrations and diasporas and taking root among non-mainland Chinese populations, as well as local populations they interacted with. Historically Zhengyi do not acknowledge "spiritual lineages"(ones traced to a legendary figure or deity rather than a live human) while Quanzhen acknowledge such origination very far back but not in recent times (e.g., to claim an immortal master who is not in the imperial records 900 years ago may be fine, but if it's 190 years ago you have to have the name and the biographical data for who he or she is! And if the verifiable origin is only very recent, well, it's not a lineage. Lineages are heng, durable.) As time goes by though, and especially with some relatively recent historic upheavals and farther migrations (such as to the U.S.), it gets progressively harder for a non-specialist (and not always easy for a specialist) to tell who is transmitting a genuine "grandfather" or a genuine "spiritual" lineage and who is taking advantage of the overwhelming ignorance of Westerners (and the majority of modern Chinese) and claiming/inventing a lineage for to make a buck. On the other hand, "professional skeptics" whose own spirit is bu ren will foam at the mouth denying legitimacy to any lineage that deviates from a particular indoctrination they themselves have experienced, being ill-equipped to tell anything from anything that they didn't learn by rote. So, no wonder that some people give up on viewing these things as important (besides, by now, when new age has shown signs of turning into a "lineage" of sorts in its own right, many have already been taught it's unimportant -- their indoctrination as to what is important and what is unimportant deems continuity of things that are whole, which is what traditional lineages see as their main value, unimportant, and substitutes its own ideas and values.) In the absence of a frame of reference, anything goes. Traditionally, such frame of reference was very simple: results. Lineage taoism is pragmatic and efficient in its undertakings, this is not a head trip, and "tao of the mouth" didn't support anyone trying to make it as a taoist in the world or away from the world alike. So, a lineage was not about "ideas" -- it was about know-how that can resolve a problem, from a practical one to an existential one. No one trusted a specialist in existential problems who couldn't demo any competence and any impressive results solving practical ones. I believe it's fair. It is possible to find a Zhengyi lineage in the US -- i.e. a non-monastic taoist lineage that can name the teacher of the teacher but is usually either difficult or impossible to trace farther back than two, three, four generations. It is a lot harder to verify such a lineage. So, one would have to either ignore all lineage concerns and settle for new age, or else take up taoist studies and practices that gradually develop one's innate ability to see and comprehend patterns and come up with progressively more accurate assessments of what one is dealing with. I believe that for purposes of here and now, the stellar opportunity in this respect is taiji. There's quite a few solid, indisputably documented authentic taiji lineage holders teaching in the US. None of the familial ones I am familiar with teach taoism as such to one's intellectual mind, but they teach "tao of the overall functioning" to your whole system, on all nonverbal levels at once, and gradually turn you into, well, "someone who can tell." This might not equip you to argue with "researchers" -- you might not have all the quotes from Needham or Saso or Robinet on hand to "prove" what is and what isn't legit. But you will be equipped to know without reading up and to tell without a shadow of a doubt -- in many cases, from just taking one look or hearing one claim, you will know exactly what you are dealing with, a lineage or a business or both (they are not mutually exclusive, but a lineage is not necessarily a business and a business is not necessarily a lineage. )

So, I was reading this article just published in Nature, and apparently they have confirmed scientifically, though they don't know it yet, a few fundamental taoist axioms -- to wit, that wuji gives rise to taij, and that extreme yin flips over into yang, and that absolute stillness gives birth to movement. http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-zero-1.12146

That Chinese sound used to be rendered in Wade-Giles as a T and then revised in Pinyin and designated as a D. In reality it is both and neither. Not a single sound of Chinese has an exactly corresponding English sound. Older English renditions say "tao" and newer say "dao," which is why people tend to think "dao" is correct -- audio material wasn't readily available in Wade-Giles times and when it became available, Pinyin already took over. I prefer to write "tao" but pronounce "dao," write Wen-tzu but Laozi, and so on. It's a matter of tradition -- Lao Tze was translated so many times as Laozi by now that it's not a problem to adopt the modernized version, while the latest translation of Wen-tzu I've read still says Wen-tzu, and since I didn't do the work of translating it, I use it out of respect for the translator. I use Pinyin for most other purposes (e.g. qigong rather than chi kung, taiji rather than tai chi, etc.) The advantages of Pinyin are not phonetical -- I can't honestly tell which is closer to the Chinese version (and in Russian we have a totally different way of representing Chinese sounds, obviously... and our way to say "taoist/daoist" is "daos"). The part which is a huge improvement with Pinyin IMO is the abandonment of the prior tradition to split Chinese words and names into the constituent syllables, something that made them hard to "hear" and harder to remember. Imagine how difficult your name would be for a foreigner if it was written as An Drew Ri Chard Son or Kim Ber Ly Do No Van or Mar Ga Ret That Cher. But that's exactly how older versions of Romanization of Chinese went about it. Pinyin set that part straight, which is why I prefer it for most purposes.

Is this compassion?..

@ sinansencer: yup, one can do "uselessness" perfectly -- know that Zhuangzi story about a perfectly useless tree? If you're "useless," you can't be exploited. Taoism shows some of what it knows (doing its yang thing), hides some (doing its yin thing) -- what it hides, but what one can infer from some of its ideas, is the deep knowledge of this being a world set to exploit, to "use," to treat people as tools, as means toward an end, as objects applicable to tasks... and at its core, taoism is the antidote to this state of affairs. Since the state of affairs is anything but simple, the antidote is to be customized to a concrete situation every time... hence a wide and flexible, adjustable range of how one can go about tao-ing. It is a continuous interplay between the constant, the unchanging, and the constant change, an equilibrium continuously aimed at that can't however be set "once and for all." Most of it is better grasped through taoist practices than taoist musings though. Someone of vastly superior taiji skill once told me, in a lesson concerning rooting/stability/balance, "if you are completely comfortable in any position, you are tensing somewhere in order to maintain it. You have to keep noticing you're slightly uncomfortable as soon as you settle 'completely,' and micro-adjusting, because you keep changing -- you can't stop in any situation that was comfortable a second ago without forcing it, because this second is gone and you are already different and the world is already different... so adjust! Adjust!!" @GP: methinks taoism is no different from any other human endeavor in that it can be done/understood/taught/preached all wrong. Errare humanum est.

Deci, did you read my mind, or the part I wrote and then deleted? It was this quote: Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. -- Sir Winston Churchill

I am Quanzhen and I assure you it is not. But then, you would have to have a definition of "repressive" that is the same as the one I have. What is hard is to tell whether something is repressive or not based on the external markers. The goal of restricting certain behaviors may be repression or it may be freedom. When your arm is broken, you wear a restrictive cast so it can heal. When you are one and a half years old, you need to be stopped from rushing into the traffic in a busy street. When they prohibit your feelings and behaviors and states of consciousness they don't like because they want you to be manageable and controllable per their specs -- that's repression. Taoism has nothing of the kind. I mean taoism the real thing. God only knows what one may find out there under the name these days. Oh, and it's not hard at all to tell what taoism is "not." Really. Much, much easier than to tell what it "is."

Taoism is not about repression. There was a famous taoist artist, forget his name, whose amazing works were studied and copied by many aspiring students of art for centuries. He was never sober. The way he painted his masterpieces is described as follows: he would mix some ink into a bucket of wine, then with a mighty roar he would dive into the bucket with his head, soaking his long hair in the inky wine, and then vigorously smack a silk screen with his mess of a mane. Then he would take a step back, squint, look at the pattern, grab a brush and add a few strokes here and there. Voila... masterpiece. Not that it's typical. His followers were more typical, the ones who would spend a lifetime laboriously perfecting just one subject -- the artist who painted flowers painted only flowers, nothing else, and the one who painted birds could take it maybe as far as fish but no father, and the one specializing in cats might do a big cat, a tiger, but not a dog and not a mouse! The mouse artist was the one doing the mouse, and some only painted sleeping mice, only sleeping mice, not mice who are awake! That's the range of taoist specialization... from "perfect only this and don't get distracted doing anything else" to "do whatever you want -- provided you do it perfectly!"

Compassion means skillful action is correct. What passes for compassion instead much of the time is neurotic projection and emotional diarrhea. "Empathy without relief is like mustard without beef" -- old proverb, a wise one. A girlfriend of mine developed a neurological problem, which first manifested as fainting spells. The first time she fainted, she came to to find her head throbbing and adorned with a huge bump from hitting it on something hard, and furthermore, her husband on the floor beside her, in a swoon. Turned out that he was so compassionate that when he saw her faint, he promptly followed suit. Instead of being helped with skillful action, this woman had to get busy resuscitating and then comforting her "compassionate" spouse. If he got her an ice pack for the bump on her head and two aspirin, and then got busy researching who to consult so as to get a correct diagnosis (something that only happened a year later, after much unnecessary suffering), that would have been skillful action -- true compassion, not the feckless neurotic kind. Does this make sense to you?..

Ah the new age prescriptions of how a master "should" be. The pigeon holes of pre-selected (by whom?..) qualities he or she must fit in in order to qualify in the eyes of, um, the angels. Has nothing to do with the taoist tradition which calls for studying the nature of the Time and blending in or going against its flow consciously and wisely. The tradition of "leaving the world and coming into the world," which means it's actually the same master who will be humble and invisible at times and forceful and visible at other times, depending on which stage of the process he's at. "Leaving the world" is not a higher or next or superior stage. It can be first, it can be intermediate, it can be last. "Coming into the world" is not a lower or inferior stage. One can proceed to come into the world after leaving the world -- usually it happens when the master has gained enough gong fu to benefit the world by coming into it -- sometimes forcefully -- and when the world is ready to benefit from what he or she has to offer. There's ancient stories (some of them translated by Eva Wong in Tales of the Taoist Immortals) of arrogant masters who behaved like stars of their own show -- and then completed their human appearance and turned out to be real stars from heaven and departed there to shine in that show of "I'm a star" which also happens to be the simple truth of what they are. They can't be invisible. Stars shine! Arrogantly, in your face! I looked at the clip and, even though I've no bagua and can only look through the eyes of taiji, I noticed that BKF is super soft, very fast the way you can only be when you have all your joints open, has an absolutely correct posture, is proficient in "the whole body is a hand" (notice how he turns his back into a "palm" at one point to push the opponent) -- in other words, what I'm looking at in no way contradicts what I've been told by very experienced fighters, who assert he is a formidable martialist. The softness is amazing, I've only known one person in real life (much more overweight than Bruce) who is this soft (forty years of taiji... an "invisible" master, doesn't teach anyone... doesn't need to make money... born into money, made more in completely unrelated areas...) At this level of skill the bulk becomes a weapon, not a hindrance. (The taiji tradition is to use what you have -- if you're skinny and small you use that -- perhaps by luring the bigger, taller opponent into uncomfortably low stances and getting him from where your small stature is an advantage... if you're tall and long-limbed, you use a different approach... if you're bulky, still another... but everything can be turned into skill, your every physical trait can be cultivated into an advantage.)

The reptilian side of Icke's information is just about the most accurate part of it compared to quite a bit of the rest of it (some issues he touches upon he stretches in the directions he's either cointelpro'ed to stretch or else it's his personal slant). People who think it's the reptilian connection that's untrue and ridiculous and so on are welcome to historic records -- quite a few (possibly all) royal families officially derive their origins from this or that reptilian, they say it themselves, Icke didn't make it up. E.g., the Merovingian dynasty begins its recorded history with Merovec, whose mother (or in somewhat botched later records, father) was a sea-dragoness, bistea neptuni. She (or he) bestowed magical powers on Merovec and had all their children supposedly inherit them, and the dynastic mandate to rule came from this reptilian bloodline according to its very own members. (Source: "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, a superbly researched and fascinatingly narrated story of quite a few old mysteries, ripped off and trivialized by everybody and their brother... notably Dan Brown, for chrissake...) Icke doesn't seem to know (or isn't sanctioned to tell, take your pick) as much about the crucial players (e.g. the Jesuit Central) as about their pawns (e.g. the Rothschilds, his favorite target), omits most of the international nazi occult (you have to go to Peter Levenda's books for a perspective both deep and wide and information both accurate and mind-blowing), and all in all tends to cater to sensationalist appetites and romantic mythologies more than necessary. Not that he doesn't include some interesting truths. He does. That's what cointelpro always does... The litmus test for assessing the accuracy of any new information, however far-out to an unaccustomed eye, is not whether it contains allusions to otherworldly beings, aliens, reptilians, shape-shfters and so on -- continuously referenced under thousands of different names in all human cultures without a single exception, these abound throughout our history, and in order to deny the sum total of it we would have to start out by postulating that all our ancestors till about a hundred years ago were deluded idiots. (Which, if we remain honest with ourselves, might actually cause us to question our own current judgment instead of gloating over their cluelessness and professing our own superiority -- we are their descendants after all, what do you think was it that suddenly turned all of them into idiots and us into the first and only normal rational humans on earth?.. the fact that we watch TV?..) No. The real red flag is the very old embedded messages of intolerance, singling out not individuals and organizations but peoples or nations or races or genders or age groups (an old sleight-of-hand move that conveniently offers a scapegoat while safely bypassing the perpetrator). If you sense, smell, catch a glimpse of this -- question your own prejudice first, and if it resonates with the message... say good-bye to ever finding out any truth about anything. And if a self-examination does not reveal such prejudice -- then run from whoever is trying to brainwash you into acquiring it.

I've been there, remember?.. I've been there watching the mother, and I've been there raising children. I assure you, you are reading/writing someone else's mother into the story I told. I wonder whose.

And that's trolling.