Taomeow

Hard to tell, if you talk to Yang people some of them will tell you none of it ever happened and the Chens are impostors. too bad they don't fight it out in open combat. My taiji teacher who is also a researcher is of the opinion that all five major styles derive from Chen, but one of my taoist instructors in China who is a Yang stylist and also a researcher vehemently denies it! Since I have the greatest respect for both, I make a point of holding no opinion in this respect...

HE, are you talking from experience applying silk reeling to fighting or is it all theoretical? Take a look at Steve's post up the page. I'd take it to heart.

That's the spirit. You are not wrong and you are not right -- it is exactly like I said: depends on who you ask. The reason I know that the name is applicable is because it is applied -- that's what I was told in the History Museum of Shaanxi Province when I asked the guide who those gods are. She cited several sources for various interpretations of their names and designations, of which I remember little except for the crucial fact that trinities are legion and "pure" among them are the ones the worshippers designate as such. When I looked online the other day, I saw only two entries and a bunch of pictures that mention it's the same thing, and a statistically larger number of those that assert it's different. (That's how I can always tell who has learned whatever they offer hot off the internet! -- the lowest common online denominator will invariably rule in their pronouncements.)

I'm flattered but reluctant to take the credit -- since you're amusing yourself snip-quoting me, it's entirely your own self-service whereby you succeeded in entertaining yourself, I can't possibly claim any merit, much to my chagrin. And I thought you said you don't practice anything. You're too modest. Surely the PA (Passive-Aggressive arts) practitioners can count you among their most accomplished masters?..

Yang Luchan, watching the Chens practice, so the story goes. Yes, a lot can be learned just doing silk reeling, and the forms of course, but not fighting. I didn't say there's no other benefits to taiji, there's plenty. But Yang Luchan, according to the legend, didn't learn it all by watching through the fence -- he eventually got caught, and begged the Chens to teach him, and they did. Sheesh, I wish I could make progress in taiji by just watching it done by others -- I'm pretty lazy!

Reading comprehension 101 anyone? I didn't say The Kitchen God, I said "kitchen gods" and I know them from THE Kitchen god. YRWong again. Research. If you can't find where I got what I said from, ask. If you ask nicely, I'll point you in the general direction of a wider perspective than the pinhole you always look through.

Have you ever tried pronouncing what you sign your posts with aloud?..Why does it actually sound as the slightly accented way to say "I am wrong?" ??? -- 'cause you usually are. You can't throw an "opinion" at me as though you put the last dot over the last "i" and closed the argument. You may want to ask me why I think what I think, what sources I have, etc.., you can't really "put me in my place," haven't you tried many times, haven't you learned?.. You can't just correct me from your high "I AM WRONG!!!!" horse and get away with it. Never could, never will. Give it a perennial rest. I know you, you know me, give it a rest. Do the "I am right" thing for a change of pace.

Depends on who you ask. Depends on the sect. Depends on the region. Depends on how canonized the term "Pure" is when applied (liberally) to assorted deities (not very). In Guandong, the Three Stars are called Fuk, Suk, Luk and are far better known as "kitchen gods." The "Three Pure Ones" sometimes refers to the Star gods (aka Cantonese kitchen gods) as I said it does, and sometimes to Yu-ching (Jade Pure), Shang-ching (Upper Pure) and Tai-ching (Great Pure), but these three are sometimes understood as the highest deities, as you said they are, and sometimes as just a triad of immortals, and sometimes are believed to be different manifestations of Laozi in his deified form. Taoism is immense and tianzun ("the countless taoist deities") can be a bit confusing. Tai Sui, e.g., has 64 incarnations. Quan Yin is a bodhisattva of buddhism and yet a taoist goddess. Go figure.

Also known as the Three Pure Ones. Very ancient, very much venerated. If they came to you when you weren't looking, it means they are offering a connection of sorts. That's how mine came to me too -- as soon as I created the first, most basic taoist altar, that very day at a local thrift shop the Three Stars showed up, a synchronicity very hard to miss, so of course I bought them and put them on the altar.

Absolutely every style is good for fighting if taught correctly and practiced long enough in both form and sparring. You can't fight at all with any taiji style if you are self-taught or if your teacher does not know the martial applications, or knows them but chooses not to reveal them to his or her students. You also take longer to learn to fight with every single style of taiji than with any hard MA. When I was doing taekwondo, I was ready to fight in a year. With taiji, using completely different principles, I'm still learning how to avoid the fight, after several years. You know what the creator of karate wrote after he won every fight against every style of hard MA and went to China to check out an old taiji master? "Karate is a really good art. Superior to all other martial arts for humans. Taiji is for superhumans."

My teacher once said that Yang is like a river flowing over a smooth bed of sand, and Chen is like a river flowing over a smooth bed of sand with some boulders on the bottom -- suddenly it will splash and form whirlpools and vortexes in its way. To this I would add that if you went swimming in the ocean on the East and West coasts, you could also compare the East coast to Yang and the West coast to Chen. On the East coast the waves can be large or small, depending on the weather, but they have a measure of regularity to them, all going in the same direction, you can sort out what to do with them -- swim over or dive under, and you can keep swimming uninterrupted by them. Yang style ocean. On the West coast, more often than not you can't swim uninterrupted -- it's like swimming in a giant washing machine, you can't go in a straight line, you have to jump, change direction, duck, the waves can collide on you two at a time, turn backward, now push, now pull, tumble you off your track -- they are full of surprises. That's Chen style ocean. Another thing. As a family, the Chens (most of them, with at least one exception I know of) are tall and long-limbed, and their family style seems to be suited well for this type of physique. Some moves make a lot of sense if you have long arms, not so much if not. Other than that, the differences between the five major styles are in flavor, it's like ice cream -- peach or pistachio, chocolate or strawberry, ice cream is ice cream, taiji is taiji. Or, like in my example, the ocean is the ocean. If it's not cold, it's not ice cream, it it's not wet, it's not the ocean, if it's not based on the fundamental taiji principles, it's not taiji.

In many traditional systems it is believed that the deceased loved ones only show up in one's dreams for important reasons. In many cultures the names of the deceased family members became taboo, the belief being that the souls should not be kept tied to the places where they lived and people they loved because this can interfere with their departure to where they need to go. One was supposed to honor them at allocated times (e.g., taoists create an altar with the tablets bearing the deceased relatives' names and offer food, drink and incense at some regular intervals) but not think too much of them and not name them aloud (until much later after their departure) so they don't take it as being "called." Finally, if someone's health was poor, a deceased close relative in a dream was thought of as "coming for them" and calling them. So, if you want a traditional approach to such dreams (and, no, they are not related to any energy practices whatsoever and happen to non-practitioners and practitioners of anything alike), there's a few things I would suggest: think of following the taoist custom of feeding the ancestors. It is thought of as safeguarding their well-being in the other world and their help to their living posterity. If it's not done, they may be disturbed and are thought of as being able to cause their posterity some trouble; make sure your health is fine -- a check-up maybe? if these dreams persist, there may be a feng shui problem with the graves, which can interfere with the peaceful rest of the deceased. The worst kind is where any water after the rain, or (worse still) ground waters are flowing into the burial site. But there can be many other problems too. If an altar does not help, try finding a yin feng shui practitioner to assess the situation with the graves. Good luck!

Does he mention Taomeow as the original author of this line? -- my argument of years ago, repeated many times here and elsewhere. I read a book recently that argues the body finds the middle ground boring, and without doing the extremes one can accomplish nothing in the long run with any regular practice that isn't challenging. The author believes 20 minutes of your absolute over-the-top extreme is enough, but 2+ hours daily of your comfort-zone practice is not. I tend to believe this. Look at how children play -- they will run like the wind in short bursts of extreme give-it-all-you've-got effort and then stop... never jog. The masters of old did the horse stance under the table... a low table.

Thank you, Rainbow! I'm no stranger to using myself as a combo of the research scientist AND the lab mouse wrapped into one. With diets, there's hardly anything I haven't explored empirically (except for the most idiotic ones like the FDA pyramid). I know by now how to watch myself for what it's doing for me or to me without falling prey to an ideology (did it once, with vegetarianism -- stuck it out a whole year! -- even though it was clear in three months that it's not working. Ideologies tell the body to shut up and do what the dominant baboon the ideating mind tells it to. I promised mine it won't happen again. ).

I've been bigu for the past ten weeks, in its paleo version, which calls for abstaining from nearly all carbs and starches in addition to all grains (i.e. all starchy vegetables like potatoes and root veggies and squashes, most fruit, all sweeteners including the "natural" ones like honey, and all beans -- including all soy products.) The deal is very high fat (mostly animal sources, butter, and quality saturated fat like coconut), moderate protein (from organic grass-fed meats and seafood, partially raw, game if you can lay your hands on it, eggs) and (for those who tolerate it well) fermented dairy (kefir, raw cheeses, preferably sheep and goat), with unlimited nonstarchy vegetables and some berries on the side. The experiment is in full swing. It is surprisingly easy (the three monsters wither within three days if you do a cold-turkey transition -- I wouldn't recommend doing it gradually, you're either a sugar burner or a fat burner, it's a metabolic switch you flip -- and flipping it halfway is a stuck position. If you go cold turkey on carbs and starches, it takes about a month to switch. THEN the fun really begins. ) The extent of my "cheating" is limited to a spoonful of sugar in my coffee and occasionally different (and more) fruit than just a handful of berries. Otherwise I've followed it very strictly and love the effects so far. White Wolf, if you've been a vegetarian for the past few years, I believe your initial approach may need to be somewhat different though. If you don't eat meat, the body shuts down the production of digestive enzymes and downregulates the hydrochloric acid for processing it (it's a feedback loop, pun unintended -- if you don't feed your digestive system a particular type of food, it learns to save on the enzymes expenditures -- our metabolic economies are frugal, and if you teach your body there's no use for proteolytic enzymes, it will stop making them or at least downsize the production to a minimum.) So when you reintroduce it, you have to do it gradually in smallish amounts and take proteolytic digestive enzymes with your meals.

Exactly! One thing to keep in mind is that compassion is not unnatural... I feel funny even having to put this in bolds but some of the contributions compel me to... When a view of wuwei (or anything else for that matter) somehow leaves it out of the equation, well... we do concoct some robotic values or other to abide by instead. Compassion is not orderly, not predictable, not looking over its shoulder to see if it's breaking any rules. It can break all the rules and still triumph over everything else. It is a "disorderly" kind of wuwei -- it can afford to be because it embodies wuwei, not merely follows it. If it wasn't so, human life could never exist. A human child is born completely helpless, completely unable to take care of itself. Taking care of a newborn baby is a helluva lot of work that will never happen "all by itself" in a billion years. Mother has to do it, see?.. Because she is modeled on tao (unless she's fucked up and doesn't do it, or doesn't do it right because it wasn't done right for her when she herself was a helpless infant and so that's the only thing she knows -- how to fuck things up that are helpless and dependent and in need of her work of nurturing.) Compassionate action is wuwei for a normal, undamaged human being. Rationalizing its withholding is not. Even though we are trained to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to situations we encounter daily where we would act compassionately naturally if we weren't so deprived of compassion ourselves, so used and numbed out to this state of affairs, that behaving like "real humans" has to be "figured out" instead of happening spontaneously. Much like one's immune cells don't have to ask anyone's permission to kill -- but compromise the whole organism if they fail to, or fail to do it in a timely fashion, letting death in instead of "intervening." Wuwei lets life in, is what it is. And the method it uses is timely, energy-efficient, and compassionate. Meaning, it does not do mindless killing or mindless sparing of life. It's spontaneously mindful, though a modern human may have a hard time wrapping her mind around the concept.

And not even only that! Disharmony is a great power. The sage uses it when she must. In this she learns from the tao whose way to come into manifestation is by upsetting the balance. Tao-in-stillness is completely harmonious. Yet she doesn't stay in this state, because stasis is not the Way. You have to upset the balance before you grasp what balance IS. Actually, wuwei is impossible to grasp on the level of the left brain language-dependent cognition. Take zhi, for example. Zhi does not operate through verbal concepts at all. (In fact, no shen does except for Hun, and Hun is one fifth of the human capacity to act wuwei. One needs to master the totality for anything to be wuwei, not just the surface.) Zhi is the innermost power behind our actions, and within its will is a drive toward fulfilling destiny. This task is not dependent on one-at-a-time linear actions or nonactions. It is dependent on grasping the whole picture, and informed by the developmental history of your whole ancestral tree and, wider, the whole ancestral tree of humanity and, wider, the whole genealogical "tree of life" of the world, the stars and suns and planets, energies and meanings, tao itself. The acts arising from grasping THIS picture can't be properly evaluated in a linear fashion. Zhi may introduce local disharmony because it sees that the outcome down the line is harmony on a larger scale. The real harmony whose aspect is disharmony. A sage intervenes or does not intervene toward this "bigger picture" because she can "see" it where others can only see a linear sequence -- do this, don't do that, B will follow from A, therefore I must or mustn't do A. Another peculiarity of wuwei is its intimate union with time. What is timely is always wuwei. What is not timely is never wuwei. So one has to learn to be aware of the timeliness/untimeliness of one's action or nonaction first. Another aspect of wuwei is energy expenditures. One could say that whatever takes the path of the least expenditure toward maximum result is the wuwei path. And, conversely, anything that grabs, greedily, too much energy toward a result that does not require this much is not wuwei. Many taoist arts utilize this principle, and of course internal martial arts and real (non-forcing and non-slacking) alchemical work.

Steve was a great mod and remains a great member.

Good question! I imagine them climbing on the mother's back to get in, and then being unable to climb out. I've seen it happen to kittens in a box. In the "What made you laugh today/tonight" thread there's an account (from over a year ago -- post #28) of the rescue of one of my cats by a daredevil team with a ladder... check it out folks if interested... it wasn't just something that made me laugh -- it was one of those things that happen a few times in each person's life that make one nearly die laughing.

(Ten thousand stinging witticisms fall to my feet like flies, struck down by the swatter of my self-control.)

Congratulations. You noticed a typo.

Anger is one hundred percent justified -- and one hundred percent misplaced -- in the vast majority of cases. I'm reading Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic by Bette Bao Lord (the Chinese wife of the former US Ambassador to China), and among many terrifying stories of inhumane treatment of humans by humans, cruelty difficult to believe on a difficult to believe scale (with hundreds of millions of participants at any one time during the Cultural Revolution), one story especially gave me a heartache that won't go away. This man, who later became one of the party leaders and the only one people said had a human heart of all the cadres (after the author interviewed hundreds asking them to name one), was abused, humiliated and terrified during the campaign against "rightists" (one of many assorted campaigns that targeted this group, then that, with the perpetrators themselves becoming the next victims -- my parents' and grandparents' generations had undergone exactly the same drill in their own time in their own country, so it's nothing new to me). He learned to keep his head low, guard his every word (preferably keep silent), but he talked in his sleep. Since the living arrangements for him and others undergoing "reeducation by labor" were ten people to a brick bed, side by side, it became mortally dangerous for him to sleep, because in the morning someone always said he'd been talking in his sleep, and the man was afraid that he would blurt out his real thoughts while he was asleep and had no control over his speech. So he tried not to sleep at all -- after 16-hour back-breaking work days and on the most meager food rations just short of starvation. He was so weak, frightened, exhausted and desperate that he didn't know his own anger until one day he found a cat purring peacefully in his sleep at a spot where he used to sit after work. He grabbed the cat by the throat, flung him against the wall, and kept doing this until all that was left of the living creature was a bloody pelt. (A few years earlier, when he was just a kid, he hugged and held tight his own cat while a warlord's henchmen in the next room tortured his father with hot coals.) The cat was not the source of his troubles. But this is how people are. This is how ALL people ALWAYS are. Whatever they do with their anger is inadequate. Because the anger is real, and the disowning of it by any which methods is bogus. The trick is to not take out the anger on whoever is the cat from the story. But most people do. So, I usually have only one advice for anyone who feels anger: take heart, it's a sign you are a bit healthier than those who don't. Don't be ashamed of it. Your anger is one hundred percent justified. Just make sure you don't turn anyone into its target who is not its real source. And never stop looking for the real source. And don't fall for the decoys. This is the only purpose not only of anger, but of wisdom. Anger must be returned to its real source, and wisdom is what can stop one from doing anything else with it.

Think I'm gonna sneeze? A pause interrupting life. Everybody waits.

Far as I've been able to discern so far, taoist cultivation (and some other rare modalities) can teach one to tell a feeling that is real and human (ren) from a pseudofeeling that is the outcome of numbing out and distorting real human feelings (becoming bu ren). Nothing is wrong with "just allowing" feelings. The devil is in being able to have them, instead of the bu ren substitutes...

Pleasure is the only thing in the world that is not wrong, but it's not a thought or an idea, it's a feeling. Gloating, which is an idea rather than a feeling (since it is not systemic and does not involve a harmonious resonance between the body, the mind and the spirit), is not pleasure, it's a defense against pain, in the form of enjoying the pain of deprivation in others so as to blunt your own. These "others" never end though -- there's always someone who is more than you and has more than you. If your gauge for determining whether you're experiencing pleasure or pain is a comparison between yourself and those "others," the pain never ends, and the painkiller relief of gloating, in the form of finding someone who is less and has less, can only be temporary until you run into someone who is more and has more. Does this make sense to you?