Taomeow

Opinions of people who don't have a lineage teacher fall into two major categories in my experience. Leaving out the total beginners, the perpetually clueless, the dabblers, and brief exploration ride takers, cultivators who don't have a lineage teacher usually know what they're missing, and they know that until they have that, they will have to either admit to themselves and (importantly) others they flat out don't have it -- or else fake having something better. This is a bifurcation in the road of a prospective cultivator. The ones who take the "I don't have it yet" road will probably have it or not, eventually, depending on what they do and what destiny does, it will be the process of co-creation between their effort and destiny. The ones who take the "I don't need it because I am special" road will never have it. Destiny is a lineage. Destiny works with what went before. What went before is destiny. Those who take the road of "I don't need a lineage because I'm special, because it's overrated, because it's for the gullible sucker which I'm not -- I'm sophisticated, smart, magical, creative, special, special special special -- lineage is for the average Joe and I'm a way-above-average Joe," etc., go deeper and deeper into their trouble. The trouble is a divorce between what their real destiny is and what they're faking. This makes them uneasy around those whose inner lives are not split by this conflict. Toward these, the former take defensive, offensive, or passive-aggressive stances. Call them names too. "Hive beings" my ass. And they have to keep lying... to themselves, to others, eventually to students if/when they amass their own. Why do they have to keep lying? Because there's difficult, baffling, incomprehensible junctures in real lineage cultivation, invariably, and a lineage means hundreds or even thousands of years of others running into the same obstacles before you, and sorting out what to do about them. (E.g., a teacher in my lineage told me that about 800 people died trying to solve one particular cultivation problem before it was solved -- 900 years ago. It's been taught safely since then.) A lineage also means massive discoveries on the way, not by one person but by the collective cultivation luck of, well, the whole lineage. A lineage teacher has it all to offer you at the right moment, he or she knows how to proceed. The one who doesn't have that will have to pretend the obstacle never happened. Lie about what it is they are doing banging their heads against this bar or that. Say it's for to open the third eye, e.g.. Say it's to get a light bulb to go off at the crown. Whatever. But what they are really doing is banging their heads against an impenetrable stone wall of their own hubris.

A doctor on TV said that in order to have inner peace in our lives, we should always finish things that we start. Since we all could use more calm in our lives, I looked around my house to find things I'd started & hadn't finished. I finished a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of Chardonnay, a bodle of Baileys, a butle of wum, tha mainder of Valiuminun scriptins, an a box a choclutz. Yu has no idr how fablus I feel rite now. Sned this to all ur frenz who need inner piss. An telum u luvum.

Some people seem to take Christmas very seriously.

A Chinese taoist and his Egyptian Arabian horse

21 This will grow fast -- do you know the story about the Persian shah who lost his fortune? 34 He was an accomplished chess player, and he challenged a master to a match, promising, if the latter wins, any reward he wishes... 55 The master said, I don't need much, oh mighty shah. Just give me two grains of wheat on the first square of the board, and square that for the second square, and square that for the third square, and so on... all sixty-four of them. And the shah agreed.

Blue crows on ship docks. White cat with blue collar strikes. Blue feathers. Oil drops.

Gosh! a harsh winter... December San Diego, blue toes in flip-flops.

I always eat mice with honey I've done it all my life They do taste kind of funny but it keeps them on the knife

Full grown one day soon, Grandmaster P* slaps his brow, gets "haiku," gets "chain." (*P is assumed to be a syllable here, though "GrandmasterP" could be read with the P as part of the previous syllable too -- Grand-ma-sterp. The capitalizing of the P, however, allows me to guess that this is not how it's intended to be read, so P as a syllable should be legit.)

Burning with delight, the wick doesn't know yet the oil is gone and it's dead

No, it's not the same. Longmen Pai whose current transmitter is Wang Liping is a school of Quanzhen Taoism (Complete Reality). Quanzhen is mainly based on Lu Dongbin's Alchemical Taoism and the principles established by Wang Chongyang who founded it during the Jin Dynasty in the year 1167 CE. Wang Chongyang had seven disciples. Each of them founded his or her own sect. Ma Yu founded the Yuxian Pai (Meeting Immortals Sect) Tan Chuduan founded the Nanwu Pai (Southern Void Sect) Liu Chuxuan founded the Suishan Pai (Sui Mountain Sect) Qiu Chuji founded the Longmen Pai (Dragon Gate Sect) Wang Chuyi founded the Yushan Pai (Yu Mountain Sect) Hao Datong founded the Huashan Pai (Hua Mountain Sect) Sun Bu-er founded the Qingjing Pai (Clarity-Stillness Sect) Wang Liping's lineage is this one.

Sure. This is a good diet, and compared to what many fad diets and mainstream sources alike advocate, you eat way better than an average person in this culture. Here's a few modifications I would suggest since you asked for my opinion: 1. If you are allergic to wheat/gluten, eating "very little" is still too much. Gluten does not cause simple allergies, where the removal of the allergen is all that is required for the allergy to not manifest. Instead it causes immune conflicts known as "intolerance" -- meaning that exposure provokes inflammatory, degenerative, and cross-sensitivity events that reverberate through the system long after the offending agent is removed. How long? Up to 8 months after a single ingestion. So I would be extra vigilant if your symptoms are explicit (they are present in all people but hidden in many or misattributed to other causes -- a medical investigation is not undertaken unless there's full blast celiac, only diagnosable by current methods after 75 to 90 percent of the intestinal lining has been completely destroyed. Some researchers believe only 1% of the actual cases of gluten intolerance ever get diagnosed.) Keep in mind that selective breeding and genetic manipulations have resulted in modern wheat containing 24% gluten. Natural wheat's gluten content is 2% to 4%. So what used to be cavalry attacks on our immune systems throughout our agricultural history has turned into a nuclear war. 2. You mention nuts and beans in the same sentence followed by the assertion you eat them raw. I hope you meant you eat the nuts raw (not ideal, because most are high in antinutrients -- enzyme inhibitors and phytic acid that binds to nutrients in your food and makes them bio-unavailable -- so most nuts are healthier to eat slightly toasted, since this removes enzyme inhibitors and degrades phytic acid.) I do hope you didn't mean you eat the beans raw too. All legumes contain very harmful lectins, which are natural pesticides plants use to fight off herbivores, removed by soaking (a minimum of 8 hours, and cooking alone doesn't remove them at all, however cooking in combo with particular mutually neutralizing lectins from other sources, e.g. pork, does -- which is the rationale behind the use of this specific combination -- all cuisines that use pork and beans have a pork-and-beans classic.) And enzyme inhibitors, goitrogens (thyroid function suppressors) and the infamous phytic acid abound -- cooking remedies some of that (though not all -- e.g. unfermented soy beans are so goitrogenic that one can virtually guarantee hypothyroidism to any and all vegetarians who fall for the tofu-as-substitute-for-meat scam and consume it in massive amounts.) 3. I don't see enough animal fats in your diet -- in fact, I don't see any. My current understanding calls for a lot of these, but if you won't eat a lot, make sure there's at least a little. That's butyrates (the most powerful preventers of chronic degenerative and inflammatory disease), fat-soluble vitamins (A, D -- and the legend that beta-carotene available from plants gets converted to vitamin A is a bit of urban medical myth -- yes, a small percentage does, in people with stellar enzymatic capabilities... mostly it just doesn't), hormonal health (most hormones are fat-based), prostaglandins (ditto -- the immediate first-line responders to stress, don't we all need them) and on and on. And no, it doesn't clog your arteries -- peroxidized monounsaturates do, hydrogenated abominations do, and toxins in farm-factory-raised animal fat, in combination with glycating diets -- glycation is the binding of fats and proteins to sugars in the bloodstream, to be avoided at all costs. And no, you don't gain weight if you eat a high animal fat, low carb, moderate protein diet... you just don't. 4. There's more tweaking that can be done, but basically you're on the right track. Is it the Way?.. Compared to how we ate before "it all," probably not. Compared to what's lying in wait for those who just buy into what they're sold, whether mainstream or a "rebellious" but ideologically, scientifically, and above all nutritionally unsound alternative to same -- compared to that, yes, absolutely.

I don't believe in "evolution" at all -- but I do believe in sequential unfolding, the taoist "timeliness" of events, entities and processes. You have to have first things first. You have to have mammals before you have humans (doesn't follow that humans "evolve" from any particular mammalian species of course -- as they put it in Rome, post hoc sed non propter hoc). You have to have multicellular organisms before you can have mammals. You have to have eucaryotes before you can have multicellular organisms. They do not evolve anymore than you evolve from age 5 hours to age 5 months to age 5 to age 50. They are all part of the process of unfolding, of which no stage is "higher" than the previous one but every one is "different and the same." We share DNA with absolutely everything that lives. And yet a ladybug is not an evolutionary step toward the First Lady. "(Qi) blows on ten thousand things in ten thousand different ways so each can be itself." -- Zhuangzi So, sequentially it does not compute that we had a Golden Age in the past 200,000 years, and we don't seem to have been here at all before that. (No evolution involved -- just like when you were 5, the 15-year-old you wasn't there. They don't share the same spot of the space-time continuum.) Ice Ages are likely to be real, information cross-references from all manner of disciplines, though who knows -- our sciences having anything to do with life (rather than tech) have been edited so heavily, sometimes I understand the ulterior motives behind adulterating the information we get, but sometimes the purposes of the lies are only known to the lying party all the way to the top and regular scientists and their students can't possibly begin to guess. But if the Ice Age is not another dud, then we are supposed to eat 40% animal protein, 45% animal fat, 15% roots, small tart berries, occasional vegetables. Because that's the only diet that was available to us when we unfolded into our modern anatomical shape. It's not perfect compared to the mythological Golden Age -- but then, when did reality ever match the dream?..

The Golden Age may have happened, but if it entailed the absence of carnivorous species, it must have happened before multicellular organisms, many of which start out as carnivorous. I.e. it may have been reality anywhere earlier than 1 billion years ago, but not later. Here's the basic timeline of a 4.6 billion year old Earth, with approximate dates: 3.6 billion years of simple cells (prokaryotes), 3.4 billion years of stromatolites demonstrating photosynthesis, 2 billion years of complex cells (eukaryotes), 1 billion years of multicellular life, 600 million years of simple animals, 570 million years of arthropods (ancestors of insects, arachnids and crustaceans), 550 million years of complex animals, 500 million years of fish and proto-amphibians, 475 million years of land plants, 400 million years of insects and seeds, 360 million years of amphibians, 300 million years of reptiles, 200 million years of mammals, 150 million years of birds, 130 million years of flowers, 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out, 2.5 million years since the appearance of the genus Homo, 200,000 years of anatomically modern humans [edit]

What does "dear" stands for -- the fact that I'm dear to your heart or the belief that I'm patronizable?.. I sincerely hope it's the former. I've been researching nutrition and its global history for the past 15+ years -- I happen to believe it trumps any other human concerns -- so I take the subject more seriously than all religions, philosophies, and cultural idiosyncrasies combined. This is one thing we all have in common. The great unifier originally... the great divider "thru sheer happenstance" (in which I don't believe... you can't change the fate of a planet that has been relatively stable for 3,5.000.000.000 years in some 10,000 by happenstance... and changing what humans on this planet eat did just that -- to us and everything and everybody else living and dying here.) So, research notes... where do I begin? With hunting scenes on objects retrieved from burial sites of all epochs all over China, with pre-metallurgic mastery of jade hunting axes and arrowheads, obsidian fish hooks, or with my teacher's lectures on taoist nutrition? Or my research into genetics and epigenetics, immunology in general and lectinology specifically? What would you like to see? No wait... first I have to ask if you're a vegetarian. Talking about nutrition with vegetarians is a self-imposed taboo of mine. So if you are, I will just take the fifth.

Absolutely not vegan, not even close. Our genes evolved during the Ice Age and haven't changed much since -- which is why eating grains and legumes has been such a devastating affair for the human genome. When I say "haven't changed much," I mean a thousandth of a percent! The only epigenetic change (i.e. modification of gene expression in response to changes of the environment) related to digestion I've been able to find that happened in the past 15,000 years is the appearance of a gene in the Japanese that signals producing an enzyme that enables them to digest seaweed. And that's all, folks! During the Ice Age 95% of human food came from animal sources. During the Ice Age what we call "human" emerged. The diets were extremely high in animal fat. Humans all over the globe hunted the single fattest animal in their environment preferentially, both on land and on sea -- whale, seal, mammoth -- and prized the blubber above all other foods. Native American tribes fought wars over pemmican, a labor-intensive super food made of the rendered bone marrow of large animals -- bison, buffalo -- mixed with dried powdered meat and some small tart berries. Pemmican is something humans can live on indefinitely needing no other foods, which was well known, so every tribe tried to make as much as they could in a good hunting season to ensure survival through any environmental and hunting adversities. Innuits still have a term for eating low-fat species and vegetables, "rabbit starvation." Both eating the rabbit and eating what the rabbit eats is in this category. The human brain is 65% fat, all of it animal fat, all of it saturated fat. I have a video of the Lanyu Tao/Yami which I didn't post to spare the vegetarian/vegan sensitivities, but I hope you can stomach a description. Before they launch a canoe to hunt for the flying fish, they consecrate it with fresh pig blood -- the pig is slaughtered right before the launch and the blood is smeared on the canoe -- whereupon they feast on the pig. What did enlightened taoists eat? There were no vegetarians in China before the advent of agriculture, slavery, poverty, and finally Buddhism. So my guess is, taoists ate what all Chinese ate -- until what all Chinese ate deviated from the Way.

Who knows?.. Tao/Yami people from Lanyu (Orchid Island) may provide one of the last clues... Here's what a friend tells me who's been there: "Lanyu is an island just off the coast of Southeastern Taiwan. There were many aboriginal tribes in Taiwan's main island, but the Tao/Yami were the least modernized till very recently due to their isolated location. Their entire culture was built on fishing, just one species -- the flying fish. To call if fishing may even be a little misleading. The flying fish season was not really all that long. They would row their canoes into the Pacific at night and light up the torches. The flying fish would get excited and start chasing the light. The Yamis will use nets to catch the fish while they are in mid-air instead of in the water. They will catch as much as they can and feast on them and dry the extra for the rest of the year. The government of Taiwan pursued 'modernization' very vigorously, so they aren't eating or living as simply anymore."

I don't know if it's beneficial for all cultivators -- depends on what they're cultivating. Spiritually, rice is the base of a pyramid, with rice farmers on the bottom and spirits and deities feeding off their life energy on top. In between you have steadily narrowing down layers, each sitting on top of the lower ones -- rice eaters, rice merchants, rice corporations, Chinese emperors, Monsanto, steadily narrowing down to the guy on top, the God of Slavery. So anyone cultivating a hierarchical paradigm of any kind can eat rice with impunity. It is gluten-free. But if you cultivate against the pyramid, toward an influx of nourishing qi from the top to the bottom, not to attain a higher state but to correct the draining of energy from the base toward the top, if your cultivation aims to revert the flow -- shen to qi to jing, spirit to life, mind to matter, yang to yin, heaven to earth, ruler to subject, rich to poor, disembodied spirit to immortal body, etc. -- then Abstaining From Grains is a big help. If you don't eat rice, or any other grains, you haven't entered the pyramid on any level. Of course they are trying to make a pyramid out of everything -- successfully most of the time. I don't have a solution yet for not entering any pyramids on any level, which would be the Way, the royal road to the true and ultimate attainment of taoist cultivation. For now, I'm just avoiding the oldest, biggest, heaviest pyramids as much as I can, of which of course grain agriculture takes the cake, pun intended.

I'd rather discuss macaroons. A taoist on an Abstaining From Grains regimen will find that macaroons can successfully replace cookies. Prunes, runes, or any other dietary or spiritual devices just fall short. .

I like minimalistic interventions that turn random natural things into useful objects without altering them too much. Here's a recent creation of mine, a horn drinking cup. It's supposed to be suspended from a belt when a wandering taoist is, well, wandering:

Yes, it's been an honor and a pleasure.

Why hush-hush... I was just watching a documentary about the burning of all documents in China pertaining to the travels of Admiral Zheng He (who discovered America in 1421, in the course of one of his seven unprecedented and unreplicated great voyages), thinking, uh-huh, another one of those... I think I've mentioned a friend of a friend whose hobby has been (for several decades) collecting information about Burned Libraries. He currently has over 100,000 of them in his database and counting. Ask anyone in the business of collecting any information of any events what the reason might be for the destruction of evidence. The answer will be, evidence is usually destroyed to conceal a crime. As for human immaturity, it's not just behavior -- some humans are behaving as adults of the species (exceedingly rarely these days), it's physiology. We are not fully developed. We are stunted. A brain working at 5% of its capacity -- that's not infantile, that's fetal. Non-neotenic species utilize the whole of the brain they have. Also our physiology is abnormal for our habitat (hence clothes, fire-building and so on, things that scream "physiological maladaptation" where we are told they say "evolution" -- evolution is something that gives the body an environmental edge, not something that maladapts it to the environment and demands an out-of-body solution -- we haven't evolved to wear clothes and use fire, we suffered arrested development. A primate infant can't warm itself with its own body, relying on the external source, in the case of primates the mother. An adult primate is its own source of thermoregulation. We are never adult enough for that unless we practice tummo or some such continuation-toward-normalization cultivation routine. Just one example.) As for Fu Xi, remember that 13th century picture of what he looks like? alongside Nuwa the creatress of humans? Fuxi_et_Nüwa.jpg

I use ridiculous linking when I want to memorize something. E.g., a random list of a dozen unrelated objects, remembered at first glance -- once and for all, and in the original order. Example: Shark crown phone snow lamp canyon zoo plane table teacher Japan tuxedo Make the first word into a picture in your mind's eye -- OK, I see a shark. Next, you link the picture of the next word but make it ridiculous, oversized, or otherwise noteworthy, or else you won't remember. Shark eats a huge crown, having trouble swallowing it. Next, you link the next picture -- emergency phone call, "A shark has swallowed a crown! Help!" Next, the ringing phone is seen buried in deep snow and someone is frantically digging for it to answer it. The frantic digging takes place by the light of a huge electric lamp in the sky where the sun should be. The lamp base rests at the bottom of a canyon. The canyon is teeming with animals, it's a zoo. Suddenly a burning plane crashes into the cages, people and animals run in all directions. One of the running people is my high school teacher, I recognize him. He's running in huge leaps covering whole countries, continents and oceans till he lands in Japan. He is greeted by the Japanese as a celebrity and promptly changes into a tuxedo for a gala event. It takes a while to type, but only seconds to link. Now that I've done it, I will never forget that random list, ever. Which is why I don't use this method often, only when I really need to, otherwise a thousand ridiculous stories around grocery lists and to-do chores would be etched in my memory for all eternity. I spare it as much as I can. "A sage has spirit but does not belabor it, has memory but does not exploit it."