Taomeow

That too, but I have some taoist education.

You're right -- I didn't find a good online version in a hurry, I heard a much better version in a radio interview. Just wanted to throw in a pointer.

I would go visit Lady Chang-O and her alchemical rabbit, and humbly ask if a guest room in their Cinnamon Palace is available by any chance. Of course if I had a carrot in my space suit pocket to get off on the right foot with the rabbit, that would help. If I didn't have any, I'd offer a precise sensory image of it so he can try to create it alchemically.

There was no linear leadership. It was like tao. Australian aborigines didn't know there was such a phenomenon as "paternity" at all. (Pacific islanders knew but didn't care, it wasn't an important issue, since all men in the mother's family were in charge of caring for the child in assorted ways -- brothers, uncles, grandfathers and, yes, the father as part of the team, were the ones who were assigned assorted tasks when the child was old enough to benefit from being cared for by someone other than mom. The phenomenon of child abuse and molestation is still nonexistent, by the way, in the few remaining societies still living like that, e.g. the Trobriand islanders or the Miao -- or at least it wasn't twenty or thirty years ago when they still lived like that, don't know what exposure to the "civilized" world may have done since then. Violence never took place because no one was deprived in his or her own childhood of so much loving touch and care that they didn't have to suppress and then re-represent the need on some crazy level, particularly in ways that get a victim to identify with the perpetrator later in life, which is the source of an unbroken chain of child abuse and all resulting violence ever in existence in our own set-up, where every single abuser was an abused child himself or herself. Nor did they have to identify with the victim and become vegetarians. ) Because there was no father to own the child without being pregnant or nursing or carrying the child on his body, the model was applied to everything else -- you were the leader of what your body actually performed, and of nobody and nothing else. And because the mother was never alone in caring for the child (the whole tribe participated in raising every child -- that was universal for all humans everywhere), no one was paranoid about accumulating property and power toward safety and control, because social safety was a given, and control of others a ridiculous burden that didn't occur to anyone to desire. I remember...

You are talking about women in a patriarchy. I was talking about women in a matriarchy. Two different species.

"Martial arts practiced today in Western countries" are occasionally taught by top masters from China, and taught exactly the way they were taught in China before they were prohibited there and after they were allowed again. At least that's the way they are taught by the real teachers, though they are indeed taught any which way by everybody else. My taiji teacher is one of the real ones, and I can assure you there is 0% BS in what I've learned from him so far. That said, just having a great teacher with great skill and a superb way of transmitting it is only pointing at the door -- the student is the one who has to walk through the door. It's not possible for most (whether Chinese or Westerners -- many of my classmates are Chinese) to do 8 hours a day, though it is indeed traditional. Of my teacher's students only one guy does that -- a Westerner -- he is absolutely obsessed with taiji. His skill grew fast, and keeps growing. He can most definitely and very easily kill anyone who doesn't have this level of skill in a life-and-death situation, and he can easily avoid it too (which is much more important -- it's about control of the situation, not about overpowering and hurting the opponent). If I wanted to catch up with his level, I'd have to do way more work... not seek another teacher in another place in another time. That would be quite unnecessary. I have the best at my fingertips, gods of migrations be blessed. But if I have lazy fingertips (which I do, among other lazy body parts I have), it's not my teacher's fault, is it?.. Just today though my taiji kicked in automatically and unexpectedly when I was doing some shopping. A guy vigorously darted with his cart from behind the edge of the isle and caught my foot from behind with the wheel, quite expertly though inadvertently, in a classic qinna entanglement that would have twisted my ankle if I hesitated to disentangle myself even for a split second. I didn't! The cart was still moving when I jumped, simultaneously rotating my foot out of the wheel's grip and from under the cart and toward my own body ("it's MY foot," as a mnemonic rule goes for the direction of the rotation out of a qinna), and landed 180 degrees in the opposite direction, facing the cart and the guy and smiling. He was just blinking and apoligizing in total bewilderment. I was bewildered myself. This move is from a routine I've just started learning, I had no idea my body already got it -- my mind hasn't yet!

Everything is an illusion according to some systems of indoctrination, but you do put your pants on your legs, not on your head, even if the pants, the legs, and the head are all illusions. Different rules of engagement for living in the ultimate and the temporal.

Not even the dybbuk?.. No. A friend of mine related a story of his cat who contracted an entity in Taipei. A normal and peaceful cat who was doing all the regular cat stuff for a few years suddenly turned into a destructive force, running in circles for hours on end, shredding curtains and cushions, overturning vases, hissing and biting and scratching and apparently never sleeping. His mother (the friend's, not the cat's) contacted a priest, who said that the cat was possessed, but the entity was meant for the owner yet the cat took it on himself, as they often do. He exorcised the entity but said that the owner was being pushed out of his home by an ongoing spiritual attack and the cat would not be able to fend it off forever. The mother was so worried and the arguments between her and her nonbeliever son got so heated that he wound up emigrating to the US -- fulfilling the priest's pronouncement about being pushed out of his home.

No. Anyone who has lived long enough and seen things and refused to integrate them, and consequently never suspects there's stuff up the overlords' sleeve is. No, actually, not "anyone." In fact, it's conscious choice for only some, and an unconscious default mode of processing information for most. With ongoing overwhelming brainwashing from crib to grave, most don't "refuse to integrate," they are merely physically unable to. Their mind is split into a thousand compartmentalized pieces that don't communicate with each other. They think in sound bites, and the latest sound bite is taken for face value because they haven't established the neural pathways that might connect it to a thousand related ones and result in integration. People who have these pathways due to a lifelong immunity to brainwashing (however acquired) don't draw conclusions based on "flimsy evidence" -- they draw conclusions based on established skills of pattern recognition. They recognize informational patterns as automatically and as easily as you recognize the smell of coffee and can tell it apart from a punch in the nose. People with no pattern recognition neuro-cognitive machinery are usually outraged when they encounter those who assert they see informational patterns they themselves don't see. That's why I wrote in my initial entry on the subject that it is hopeless. It's like this test -- if, like a percentage of the population, you can't tell green from red, you can't see what's in the picture. No amount of green and red evidence will get someone who is physiologically not equipped to discern them to see this picture. Whereas someone who has the ability just sees it... based on the evidence of competent perceptions. Alas, for purposes of information perceptions processing, the percentages are reversed -- very few people are NOT color blind to socio-political patterns, especially the hidden ones (like that "eight" is hidden... no wait, nothing can be hidden, if you don't see something and someone does, he or she is a conspiracy theorist who believes in the unthinkable, to wit, that certain things can be hidden by the overlords?.. But it IS hidden from those who can't tell red from green, it really is... Hidden in plain sight. But not from everyone!)

Why thank you, Thelerner!

a] How it relates to the topic: The topic is, do we believe the official story? A few people suggested that we shouldn't because the ulterior motive for staging an event that would conveniently cause the population to "demand" that the government takes away everybody's guns may be that those whose objective is taking away everybody's guns might stage such events toward this goal. A few others suggested that we should, because it is impossible for the government to take away everybody's guns, so no one would stage an event toward a goal that is deemed unreachable even if someone wishes to reach it. I disagreed with both lines of reasoning. Instead I proposed that a staged event toward gaining certain objectives (false flag) is usually, if we consider many historic contexts, multi-purpose, and therefore the presence or absence of one discernible purpose or goal or objective is not a decisive factor in determining whether the event should be suspect and probed as to a possibility of it having been staged. Instead, one must look at whether things as presented make sense or don't, raise questions or don't, look suspicious or don't, and so on, while suspending judgement, in the absence of knowledge and proof, of any possible objectives of whoever may be behind anything that doesn't make sense, raises questions, or looks suspicious. b]"Are the conspiracy theorists the cowards or the ones who challenge the theory in question?" Don't quite get your juxtaposition. The ones who challenge the theory in question are the ones you et al call "conspiracy theorists." You must have meant "conspiracy theorists or cowardly conformists," which is closer to the definitions I proposed, except I believe "conspiracy theorists" is an implanted newspeak slur to be used by cowardly conformists to label everyone who looks for answers beyond the syndicated media's answers. I lived under a totalitarian system that was explicitly rather than covertly totalitarian, and no one used the term "conspiracy theorists" to refer to people who questioned the official presentations. They were referred to, alternatively (depending on the historic period), as "counterrevolutionaries" and jailed or executed, "enemies of the people" and jailed or executed, "rootless cosmopolitans" and jailed or executed, "agents of the international capitalism" and jailed or executed, "anti-soviet machinators" and jailed or executed, and finally "dissidents" who got global attention and recognition as the only people who had a clue, and glorified as heroes, some of them. I've been around the block a bit, so has my family... Cowardly conformists did not escape any of the totalitarian crackdowns with their hides intact. They were suspect precisely because they were without a moral axis, without a spine... and as a result, in the eyes of the powerful, not trustworthy despite their lackeying. So they went down with the heroes too! Slapped with the very labels they so loved to apply to others (occasionally causing the death of those others) and processed by the same machine, screaming their patriotic slogans and complete servitude and total agreement with the party line!! So, is it prudent to be a yeah-sayer to everything any current power structure prompts you to say yeah to?.. No, it is not. Is questioning stuff safe? No, it's not. Is not questioning it safe? No, it's not. I think one must look beyond the current convenient safety where one can easily misjudge (as history teaches) what is safe, and concentrate on the safety of one's soul -- from decay, cowardice, complacent "none of my business" stances, much less from smearing others who are trying hard to keep their souls in a shape that allows them to live with themselves, the seekers of inner conflicts resolutions... I don't believe in "coincidence theories" and don't trust "coincidence theorists," so when things don't make sense, my way to inner conflict resolution is to question them. And you tend to label people who question things that don't make sense to them something or other -- "conspiracy theorists who have too much time on their hands," e.g. -- which seems, to you, to be the answer to any and all questions, past present and future. Well, congratulations. Not everyone can get by on this little effort when looking for to save her soul from eternal damnation. (I don't mean it in the biblical sense, obviously, but I know for a fact there IS such a thing.) I for one can't...

Now as to the purposes of false flags as a general phenomenon observed many hundreds of thousands of times throughout history. People usually only believe that an event is a false flag when they can arrive at a simple formula to explain the motives of its perpetrators: "doing A for the purpose of gaining B." And they are always wrong in this assumption. If you look at history you will discover that most false flags are multi-purpose affairs. What was the purpose of the nazis burning the Reichstag and framing the communists? Winning elections against communists? Nooooooo. That would have been "doing A for the purpose of gaining B," end of story. They never intended the story to end there. The story was "doing A for the purpose of gaining B, C, D, E, F and then using the gained BCDEF to be able to do G, H, I, J, K, and then using BCDEFGHIJK in order to..." and so on. You don't believe that people who do evil are visionaries who are after much more evil? -- not just one random act of evil toward one random purpose? -- look at fucking history. Oh no, I forget. No one except for the despicable "conspiracy theorists" has learned any. What they learned and can impressively rattle off on any random cue is the kind of story they were dispensed by those who dispense it -- the ones who make it and then decide which part you are going to be dispensed, and in what wrapper, and which part will be kept under wraps. There's no other way a cowardly conformist can find an outlet for his righteous indignation than to attack those who challenge his cowardly conformism -- he's been sicked on them once and for all, he will never challenge anyone or anything that supports and maintains his cowardly conformism, but at the same time he will be able to always think of himself as a courageous fighter for truth (truth, of course, being whatever maintains his cowardly conformism, what else can it be?..) Hopeless...

Women didn't have to vote -- it was matriarchy, remember? Since they didn't abuse power when they had it (nor had any need to enforce it with violence), it stayed in their hands for as long as -- well, put it this way, for as long as human history, minus a brief sneeze in time that is OUR history. Is the universe violent?.. Per my investigation, it is not violent nor does it exclude violence. This has to do with the taoist fourfold cosmic process -- Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation. Following this model which, far as I've been able to discern, accurately reflects all stages of unfolding of any existence taking place in the universe, I would say the universe is 1/4 violent, 3/4 nonviolent. So the goal to become the most violent is not a prudent one, because this would interfere with the natural process, and if it was a large scale interference, sooner or later the most violent would starve. It is my impression that the healthiest societies, whether human, animal, or celestial, are following this 3/4--1/4 model. They are not violent, but they are not about total exclusion of violence. Failure to proceed to the fourth stage of the cosmic process would disrupt it and cause the most nonviolent to starve too.

Why thank you! Spiders are quite prominent in many mythologies, folklore, art, literature, and now the internet (the world wide web...) so I wouldn't know where to start (I would start with my encounter with a tarantula the size of a truck wheel in the rain forest in Peru but I may have already told this story at some point, don't remember if I did...) -- so, OK, how about a Winnebago Tribe legend: When Earthmaker had completed his creation of the world, he looked for a creature that could watch over his creation. First Earthmaker appointed Turtle to oversee things, but his legs were so stubby that he could not see very far at all. So he was recalled. Then Earthmaker appointed Crow to oversee the world. Crow could see far and wide, but he did more than just watch: he gave orders to everyone, and never was he silent for even a moment. Thus Earthmaker recalled Crow. Then Earthmaker appointed Bear. Bear could stand on his hind legs and see well and could even climb trees so that he could see in every direction. However, Bear had a terrible temper, and soon frightened the whole of creation. So Earthmaker recalled him as well. Then Earthmaker appointed Spider to watch over the world. Spider was without any passion, so no one feared her. Her voice was so small that only Earthmaker himself could hear her. Because she could climb, Spider was able to see far and wide. In the beginning, Spider had only two eyes like everyone else, but just to make sure that she could see everywhere, Earthmaker gave her six new eyes, one eye for each direction. Ever since, spiders have had eight eyes.

White Wolf Running On Air... did you know that all other wolves run on meat?.. So did humans for at least 400,000 years predating the first preacher of vegetarianism, who was a warlord turned land owner, who used brutal force to forbid the serfs to hunt on his annexed land and told them to eat grains and vegetables, under penalty of death for shooting the lord's deer or catching the lord's rabbit. I thought it was a thread about spiders. But apparently humans can set up their threads in a web too and place a decoy "spider" in the middle and sit there waiting for someone interested in spiders to get caught in the web...

Excellent! No strain on the top of the foot at all. In this correct position, any pain will be karma-releasing rather than muscle-pulling. (I would rotate the heel of the left foot slightly so there's no contraction in the achilles ligaments, and "even out" the toes of the right one. Both can be done with your hands.)

Old joke... not my grandfather.

There's a strip of the beach nearby with assorted rocks and boulders separating it from the highway, and some parking spots between the road and the boulders. If you park there, you can get to the beach by doing some very minor climbing, however you really have to pay attention to what you're stepping on so as not to lose your balance or twist your ankle or bang your knee. (Minor accidents happen, I've seen it several times.) One day I saw a woman with a little girl of about four cross that strip, and the woman let the girl do her own climbing and figuring out but kept an unwavering focus on her, repeating all the while, before every step the little girl was about to take, "pay attention, sweetie, pay attention, now pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, honey, pay attention!" I thought she was a super mom. Most parents strike me as doing too much or not enough, choosing wrong battles for their kids' awareness of failing to fight when much is at stake... and wind up raising... um... girls who invest a lot of time and money into maintaining their cuticles, and boys who don't know they have cuticles.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.

What methods do you favor, RW?

He has a very interesting face to analyze, especially when you compare his current pics to the ones from his youth. This is the face of Guan Di -- God of War.

An exceedingly important point... all our homespun karma experts should pay attention, and I think it would be beneficial for their own karma to blush and lower their eyes and bite their tongues. Nearly all top level masters get a much greater share of adversities -- health, well-being, all kinds of physical and social trouble -- than an average person living in the same period under similar circumstances. Many deities in the taoist pantheon were martyrs, gods who started out as mere mortals and took on suffering (Jesus is in good company in this respect) of others, knowingly or unknowingly (their higher self knew though...) Edgar Cayce asserted that karma can be not just individual but collectively accumulated by whole countries, whole nations, whole races. In which case every member of this country or nation or race will share in the overall debt. E.g., if your government does atrocious things which you don't do personally but don't do anything to stop either, you accumulate karma. The sins of omission. The crimes of not-doing. Stuff like that. A sage may take on a heavier burden onto herself than her sister who is not as spiritually strong, as morally together, as "equipped" to survive it and grow rather than be shattered.

From my own experience, not just "many" but 95% of them are from the preverbal time. But meanings are not predicated on words. Preverbal, yes, pre-conscious, no, pre-meaningful, never. At no point are you unconscious until you create an unconscious to stuff consciousness into. This, too, happens at the preverbal stage, but once you have this storage facility installed, everything that consciousness has learned not to accept goes there. The bummer is, it goes there, it doesn't go "elsewhere" or "nowhere." It's still you whether you know it or not. Per my own explorations, that's where you keep 95% of you. Words have little to do with it, but since the 5% of you that you do know is verbal, they have to be included eventually to tie it all together. You don't use them except at the end of the process of feeling-meaning-consciousness -- in strict accordance with the chronology of your actual development, your neocortex came last. What it does is uses words to slap a label on what's already there. Now another bummer. People love slapping labels on mystery black boxes their being is stuffed with without knowing what's in there. AND people love to mistake the labels for the contents of the boxes. If you don't engage in either folly, words are just quick shortcuts like the ones you use to google something up -- you have a label, a key word, and it takes you where whatever you're looking up is stored. (To simplify what I'm talking about a thousandfold, that is. )

Actually, it was my impression that he makes a quick nod of acknowledgement toward Buddhism so as not to offend the buddhists (or the Buddha) but believes something different. He was in fact the first author who made me question this premise myself. I didn't before. My first teacher of things tao was a Tibetan Buddhist (Dzogchen) monk, and he led me to believe exactly this. (By the way, he was a feisty, opinionated, strong character not unlike Bruce personality-wise. He was also a Westerner who went off the deep end into what he was after, spent 12 years at a monastery in Tibet... but I digress.) Bruce was the one who got me to doubt it (although with Dzogchen specifically he does think there's much similarity, but he attributes it to a more ancient influence of taoism on Tibetan buddhism, not vice versa. I know nothing about it, what I do know is that Dzogchen retained quite a lot of Bon, and Bon has a lot in common with proto-taoist East Asian shamanism, but I would hazard a common source rather than an "influence.") So, no, this is not where I disagree with him -- because I also think that there's types of buddhism that are not quite Indo-European essentially, that are very East Asian in their practices and goals, and these may lead to the same place as taoism. No, the disagreement is regarding the torture table metaphor he uses. He believes that you don't have to know what it is that is wrong, all you need is get rid of it, and his (well, not "his" his) dissolving practice is designed to accomplish this... without engaging consciousness. "Consciousness," to me, means more than omitting this part of it (e.g. thinking) and emphasizing that part of it (e.g. physical sensations and emotions without attribution). Consciousness is an integration of the totality of meanings of actual processes and events that have taken place: "this happened, and this is how exactly, and this is what it meant to me then, and this is what it means to me now, and that's why I feel this, and this is what it did to me, and this is why I am a certain way." Usually reducible to one thought-emotion-sensation, i.e. total integrated systemic feeling, which is the human way to have meaning. E.g., translated into words which feelings aren't but which can be used to "label" them for quick reference, "frustrated need for closeness," or "abandonment," or "my being fully alive is what they won't allow," or "I'm afraid of them," and so on.) Consciousness, to me, is "what really happened." I don't believe in "tension," "contraction," etc. that "just is." I am not a machine. I believe in tension that is brought about when something happened that made this part of my consciousness (and muscles and nerves and qi and so on) contract. And I believe that if you don't know what it was, and make sure you never will, it may happen again (under a different sauce, so to speak, but the same thing all over again) and you will be back on the torture table. So, he thinks it's about getting off the torture table. I think it's about becoming someone no one and nothing can drag onto the torture table. And Consciousness is the only way toward this goal. It's not about knowing everything about every change an event has caused in every muscle and bone and every brain wave and every qi channel -- this, indeed, is irrelevant. It's about the totality of the event. When you eat a bagel and you have celiac, it does not matter how much you know about immune conflicts and the precise mechanism of destruction of the intestinal lining and the flood of internal painkillers that makes you not know that you're doing damage (or being done damage to) -- but it is crucial to know that you ate a bagel. If you miss out on this one primal piece of the puzzle, the actual what-is-as-is real-life happening, you can spend your life taking antacids, prescription painkillers when you run out of your internal ones, this drug or that to alleviate the symptoms, and for a while all of it will work... and none of it will Work with a capital W. What would work is a capital C -- Consciousness. Of the bagel. You did eat it. And knowing it is the only thing that can stop you from eating it again. (Or someone made you eat it, which is what everybody's childhood is about -- no choices yet, you don't do things you are, you are made to do things you aren't. Knowing they made you eat it gives you a free choice for the first time in your life, gives you back your free will. You can keep eating this bagel, or you can stop. Consciousness is the natural biological mother of free will.) His system does not provide for finding out about the bagel. This is not his fault or his teacher's. This is a cultural taboo. If you use a system that lets you find out that what is doing the damage to you is exactly what's in charge of you, the power not to be challenged under any circumstances, you are going to be a danger to the whole set-up, what the whole civilization is running on. So you circumvent this danger by "not knowing about the bagel." You know enough to repair your own life (at least until the next bagel comes along), but the built-in limitation is, you can't be led where you will know something that would potentially repair all lives. Not just get you off the torture table and make sure you never get dragged onto that table again, but something that can potentially overturn all torture tables for everybody else once and for all. This is not allowed, and the danger of it happening has to be prevented... and therefore Consciousness is bypassed by the process. This is not unique to his system though. It's a pretty everything and everybody deal. But that's where I disagree with everything and everybody... except what went before this particular power structure we're living.

"Hot Tips" by Frances Patiky Stein. Written in 1981 (and saddled with an unfortunate trite title that was probably chosen by the editor), this book is a work of genius... yes, turns out there's geniuses in every area of human knowledge. A style book, not of trends but of fundamental principles, 95% timeless and 95% brilliant. Not because it's good writing -- it isn't... it's not witty, it's not entertaining, above all it's not theoretical -- it's practice practice practice... and it's revolutionizing my wardrobe as I go, in unexpected compliance with the taoist-ish "seek daily decrease," "embrace simplicity," etc., maxims -- but applied smartly and flexibly, not rigidly and mechanically. When I'm done (and this may take months of study and practice), I'll have donated 3/4 of the clothes I own, maybe added a few items that are missing instead... and the outcome is likely to be as precise as alchemy, as creative as taiji applications, and as effortless as riding a bicycle downhill. I've met a Teacher! Yes, they can be found in the most unlikely places!