Taomeow

You meant "to defeat one" -- rhymes better. And this one is for joeblast: I doubt I will ever see a forum lively as a bee. In fact, unless the forums fall, I doubt I'll see a bee at all.

I never saw a purple cow I never hope to see one But I'll tell you this anyhow: I'd rather see than be one.

Sun Bu-er (孫不二), one of the Seven Masters of Quanzhen, lived c. 1119–1182 C.E. in the Shandong province. She was a beautiful, intelligent, wealthy woman, married with three children. At the age of 51 she took up the study of taoism and became a disciple of Wang Chongyang. At 57, having married off all her children, she announced that her worldly and family obligations were completed and she would devote the rest of her life exclusively to cultivation. She left her home and traveled to the city of Luoyang where after twelve years of practice, at Fengxiangu cave, she attained the Tao and became an Immortal. She had several disciples, founding the Purity and Tranquility School, and wrote many poems.

I'm 2/3 done with the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Hate to see it end! -- which happens with one book out of a 1000 for me, the remaining 999 usually striking me as too damn long, a short story puffed up to a novel, a paragraph occupying the seat of a short story without having paid for it. It masquerades as "science fiction" but it's mostly historic fact, creatively reinterpreted at times, left intact at other times. The writing style -- another surprise -- is crazy without being neurotic. Most books aspiring to captivate the mind of an intellectual are written by very neurotic authors and I have little patience with them; while most books intended for the "general audience" are written by salesmen (skillful some of them, retarded most of them) and have nothing to do with literature. It was written in 1975 and most things it had to say about what's to come have so far -- that is, up to the 2/3 of it I've read so far -- proved unbelievably accurate. Much more so than most prophecies I've seen. The authors were either in on some Inner Party information, or so artistically gifted that they could translate a trend of the present into an event of the future with accuracy bordering on clairvoyance. I found a short excerpt from the novel posted by someone on the internet (it's just one page out of a book of 800 pages, so I hope no copyright violation by the original poster, much less by me, is involved) and offer it to your attention below. From _The_Golden_Apple_ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson [as extracted from pp.438f of _The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy_ compilation] "Very nice,'' I said. "But why did you bring me up here?'' "It's time for you to see the fnords,'' he replied. Then I woke up in bed and it was the next morning. I made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering if I'd seen the fnords, whatever the fell they were, in the hours he had blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out into the street. I has some pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three eyes and tentacles, survivors from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due to some form of mind shield, and did hideous work for the Illuminati. It was unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked out the window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first. Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their busses and subways. That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched the _New_York_Times_ from the hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of toast and started skimming the first page. Then I saw the fnords. The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct ``Fnord!'' The second lead was about a debate in congress on getting the troops out of Costa Rica; every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another ``Fnord!'' At the bottom of the page was a _Times_ depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more ``Fnords.'' Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: ``Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. You will look at the fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it.'' And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . . Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords. I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't been deconditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. ``No _this_ word,'' I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.

The greatest question ever asked on this forum. Ta Chuan, The Great Treatise on the Changes, is the answer.

Nope, I'm pushing you to learn the attributes of yin and yang from a good source. In particular, sorrow and joy are not a yin-yang dichotomy. The yang of a military march compared to the yin of a lullaby is not joy vs. sorrow. It's false joy (false yang, in Liu I-ming's terminology) vs. true joy (true yin). Music can be yin-sorrowful or yin-joyful, yang-sorrowful or yang-joyful, but it can't be yin=sorrow and yang=joy. Just like the rest of all phenomena in existence.

I don't think any experiences with teachers are bad provided you've learned something. It's just that you don't always learn what you expected to learn. Encountering a bad teacher is good if it serves the general purpose of your de-conditioning. If it busts an illusion of yours. It can be painful, upsetting, and costly, but who can put a price tag on the value of losing a delusion?.. Encountering a good teacher is great -- provided you don't turn him or her into your next delusion. It took me a few years to dare to question one of my teachers even on some minor points, but then someone came along who unlike me was not bound by reverence for him but not because he's clueless and can't see what's there to revere. He said, "bah, humbug, he's good but he's not growing, he desperately needs a teacher of his own!" And proved it too... And almost instantly it became clear to me that it's the truth. The teacher in question didn't lose his value to me because he's still far ahead of me in a taoist art I'm trying to master, but the illusion of his total perfection dissipated -- without hurting me in the process mind you, I just unburdened myself of a set of expectations that would never come to fruition because they were misplaced, and proceeded to learn what's really there without grabbing for what isn't. Most teachers are human. If you encounter one who isn't, e.g. the way I did with ayahuasca, you are going to be shaken out of your expectations to a MUCH more devastating extent, mind you, so learning to lose expectations when dealing with human teachers is a good lesson in preparation for infinitely more brutal ones that might be waiting for you down the road. We "normally" perceive only a very narrow band of reality mediated by our narrow band of senses. A good teacher is someone who shakes you out of this narrow band without destroying you -- but you've got to do the leg work to meet him or her or it halfway. This halfway road is what a not-so-good teacher can set you on as readily as a good one. Long as you don't run in the opposite direction, slamming your mind shut as you go, escaping in panic from any and all un-conditioning lessons, you're on the right track.

So, when your mother sang a lullaby to you, you felt sorrow? and when you heard a military march, it made you happy?

Ah, this one is my favorite. To solve it, one needs a skill similar to the mind examining itself, which some philosophers argue cannot be done. With the taoist "tool kit," however, it can be done by using the xing-ming dichotomy. A fallacy fallacy is committed by ming without necessarily involving xing in its error. If one examines it with ming alone, it's a fallacy, but if one engages xing, it may reveal itself as true despite its logical incongruence. In Western terms, a fallacy fallacy is where the rule of the left brain ends and the rule of the right hemisphere must commence. It is a transition point from linear logic to nonlinear fuzzy logic. Laozi, e.g., is full of such fallacy fallacies, which are, however, not wrong at all. Example: When a wise man hears about the tao, he follows it. When an average man hears about the tao, he ignores it. When a fool hears about the tao, he laughs. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the tao. Nothing in the synthesis arrived at in the last line follows from the thesis presented. From the left brain perspective, it's a mere non sequitur. But from the right brain perspective, it is accurate. The right brain grasps the whole picture which does not rely on logic alone -- it is fuzzy, it's a fog of "knowing," and discerning the shapes of true statements through this fog is a xing skill, a spiritual attainment. It makes all the difference between being smart and being wise.

Ahh, finally. Thank you. Been meaning to introduce the list of Logical Fallacies since I don't know when, definitely a great idea. A classic device of self-examination for the development of mental discipline and cognitive honesty. What stopped me was the thought that if folks keep spotting their own arguments as textbook examples of the opposite, some will be at a total loss as to what to say -- ever, about anything! In politics, sales, religious arguments, media dispatches, all of our schooling and, consequently, communication styles of most families, nothing but Logical Fallacies is ever utilized to make a point. Taken to heart, their avoidance is going to cause some to commit to the art of Not-Doing-Of-Speaking.

Definitely. The stories of Arjuna and Rama aren't biographies of some pot-smoking new age Gandhi wannabes. (well, they did smoke plenty of pot... Arjuna's superb archery has something to do with its beneficial effects on the eyesight. He did pick up his bow upon smoking pot though, instead of parking his ass in front of the TV... anything can be used any which way depending on who the user is... )

Well, you said taiji is a moving qigong, and indeed it can be used this way (though I'm vehemently opposed to it being taught this way -- I have come to believe that every single move has to be revealed for what it is, a weapon, with the whole spectrum of its applications -- or else you never get the taiji body dynamics right. But then you can use it as a qigong practice, or even as a stillness meditation -- the Chens in particular are fond of having you freeze a position, usually an excruciating one, and stand there meditating... on shaking feet, with burning thighs, with unbending intent. ) So it occurred to me that all ancient internal arts must be like that, versatile in their purpose -- and yoga, which is not a weapon to use against "another," can still be used as a weapon if your opponent is yourself and your own stiff, frozen, unmoving ways. A weapon against an unmoving opponent. Who is you, or your stiff joints, or your tight, stiff, locked mind.

'cause it ain't At an advanced level you hide everything. The only reason to show something -- an eye movement, a breath, a flicker of intent -- is to lure the opponent into a trap. You inhale as though about to strike and cause the opponent to "prepare" for the blow -- by instinctively and involuntarily directing his awareness to the area where he anticipates being hit -- and that causes his root to weaken and get misplaced!! -- and you uproot him instead of striking, and you uproot on the inhale!!! -- with fajin!!!! And you send a man whose weight exceeds your own by over a hundred pounds flying like a balloon!!! Unforgettable!!!!

And yoga is a martial art against an unmoving opponent.

Taiji is compatible with any qigong. What you don't want to do in some cases is two different qigong practices at the same time, especially opposite in their energetic dynamics. What taiji does for your qi is similar to what a professional organizer can do for your home or office: same stuff you've always had, but orderly and readily accessible instead of an inefficient ungainly mess where you can't ever find what you need when you need it. It does not interfere with WHAT you keep in those files, boxes, and drawers, only with how you organize them so that working with them is easier. Qigong, depending on its type, can get inside those boxes, drawers and files and replace, rewrite, expand or delete some of them, or start a new venture altogether. Unless you were told by a teacher that two or more different types are compatible, chances are they aren't. Taiji, however, is completely exempt unless you're at an advanced stage of "unexplained phenomena" which also would have to be discussed with a teacher. Good practice to you.

The Mother of the Universe, whose material earthly aspect is ayahuasca, connected us in a shamanic ceremony. Of the taoist deities, She introduced me to Wang Mu, Emperor Yu, and Fu Xi. There were others involved too but it's a very long story...

My teacher, who was asked this question many times, responds that there's no need to do anything about the breathing because if you do everything else correctly, it falls naturally into the correct pattern, and if you don't do everything else correctly, it's useless to try regulating your breath -- it will be dis-regulated all the same. Also, taiji classics (notably The Songs of Taiji which I already recommended to your attention earlier) go into great detail about everything but don't ask for any breathing techniques -- for the same reason. However, in meditation (which is part of taiji training) focus on the breathing is prominent. Zhang Sanfeng in particular has left a short but IMO superb guide to the correct technique of abdominal breathing. If you get it going in meditation, it takes over and you always breathe like that, so again, no need to do anything breathwise during taiji practice. This actually makes perfect sense because taiji is a martial art and you are going to be screwed if your sensitivity and awareness during a confrontation are engaged in regulating your breathing. It is, however, supposed to have been regulated naturally by the time you can forget all about it. So you could say that there's two phases to taiji training -- the actual practice and the meditation. Meditation concerns itself with breathing, the actual form or sparring practice does not.

This is what Wang Mu told me: "What most people think is taijiquan is the part I still allow them to have. I had to taboo the deadliest internal arts because their spread could eventually end the human race. Of the taoist styles I outlawed, Soft Nothingness, the most devastating of them all, relied on projecting antimatter into the opponent's bones. The outside of the body remained intact but the whole skeletal structure simply disappeared! Buddhists retained their own version of this style for a while, Clay Finger, which was every bit as devastating but a lot more sloppy -- instead of projecting antimatter into the bones, they projected it into the air around the enemy. Large chunks of the world are now deserts because of this. A secretive sect in Taiwan had the Yin-Yang Pendulum style whose application interfered with apoptosis, the programmed cell death, speeding it up thousands of times. A blow of the Pendulum caused its victim to die of old age within seconds! There were many more. You could say that I banned over 99% of them. People don't know how to use power without abusing it, so it has to be taken away from them on a regular basis. It will always be like that -- they will keep losing everything they once had until they learn to handle it with care."

Don't hehehe at ideas beyond your current exposure -- you'll be embarrassed when/if you actually get introduced to them when/if you are ready. I mentioned that these thoughts are not mine (I wish they were because they are one hundred percent correct), they were Ken Cohen's. He was my first intro to qigong, a long time ago. That's why I remember the idea but not the exact wording. It's not for nothing that military training has the shape and form it does, and the stance at attention is to a soldier what zhan zhuang is to a cultivator -- the mold that shapes the whole person a certain way. They don't tell soldiers, "stand like that so that you can free your mind, make your body vibrate with the sheer joy of aliveness, and cultivate your spirit so you can tackle the great mystery and become a compassionate sage benefiting all beings." Ever wondered WHY they make them stand the way they make them stand?.. Well, don't give with one hand to take away with the other one then. An overkill? ??? I haven't scratched the surface. But one of my teachers would always cut me short when I would get carried away with analysis and just tell me, "don't romanticize the theory, just get the process going." So that's why you haven't seen a real overkill. I could write a book about the Bubbling Well point alone in its relation to zhan zhuang. But... I was told to stand instead. You can't very well type in zhan zhuang. (Well, not until you're really advanced.) And now for a non-taiji non-martial example of excellent sung:

If you think taiji practitioners are bad, try asking a yiquan adept about zhan zhuang. Of course if you limit your inquiry to theorists, you can get any which theory corroborated. Here's one good theory from a practitioner though -- Ken Cohen (relating what I gleaned from his explanation, not quoting verbatim): Zhan zuang is the opposite of the military stance that's also something one can train in -- standing stiff like a concrete pole, not like a living tree. You are tense in the military stance, your muscles harden, your mingmen and all other vital points close shut. This is a position for obedience, suggestibility, following orders and commands, because you cut off the input from your own internal process and are only receptive to the external stimuli. Stiff and hard muscles are the physiological expression of a counterphobic mental state, i.e. you are afraid and you make your body work very hard on not showing it. That's what a good soldier is supposed to be -- afraid inside (afraid to disobey his superiors, terrified is even better), tough on the outside (afraid to show weakness, and toward this goal making himself into something that looks tough on the surface -- stiff, hard, iron man... with no diamond axis inside, with a bottomless pit of terror instead, hidden under all that tough bulk.) Zhan zhuang can't be used for breeding good soldiers, good hard muscular robots to obey without thinking, because its true purpose is internal freedom. Everything about this posture is aimed at restoring natural fluidity of the mind (sic) and the body, openness to finer and finer sensations, feelings, balancing/unbalancing forces on a more and more profound level. You start hearing "orders and commands" from your body, from your spirit, from your heart and mind instead of the barking of the sergeant which is what a military stance conditions you to hear. The "sergeant" can be anyone or anything, any authority, any theory -- the military stance teaches you to respond to them, while zhan zhuang teaches you to free yourself from their tyranny. What you've been advocating here all along is a military stance -- nevermind that you called it "zhan zhuang," it is just mislabeling -- put a sticker that says "chicken" on a banana and anyone who knows bananas from chickens will see what the actual product you're selling is and ignore the label that misrepresents it. The military stance has its use and its purpose. But not only does it have nothing to do with the nature and purpose of zhan zhuang -- it is its absolute direct opposite on all levels. Also sprach Taomeow.

I think you are ready to balance a raw egg on its bottom so it stands vertically and stably. If you never tried it, you'll have fun, I guarantee it! And then the next challenge -- balance it on the pointed end! The first one is zhan zhuang at your fingertips -- the second one is neigong!

Um... I did, on the very first page, see post No. 2. Both participants have done workshops at our school. Both are direct descendants of Chen Wanting, documented lineage unbroken since the 17th century, i.e. this is as authentic as it gets in at least the past 400 years. One of the participants in the posted example, Chen Zhenglei, is the official lineage transmitter to my teacher, in a formal ceremony, though the latter learned from all the Four Tigers and also the older folks still living in Chen village, as well as the folks in Beijing who were the branch of the family related by transmission of discipleship but not by blood (students of Hong Junsheng, the great disciple of the great Chen Fake). The other one, Chen Bing (his name is misspelled as Bin in the title of the video), still lives in Chen village. I think you mistake humbleness for ignorance and irony for a confession. Prince has plenty of knowledge, but that's one thing true taoist knowledge in general, and taiji in particular, does to you -- you always feel ignorant, and the more you learn from a real master, the better you understand how little you know. Every breakthrough, every time you feel you've got it, a true teacher will see as the moment you're ready for more, and that's how you discover that you're still super ignorant. If you're not ready to learn how ignorant you are, he or she will never show you. They spare you the humiliation... they are compassionate. One of my accidental teachers (not a regular one, just a friend who is very accomplished with 40 years of taiji under a great teacher, who gives me a lesson here and there when we meet -- alas, he lives too far for this to be a regular thing) is not compassionate with cocky ignorami though. I've seen him teach them differently... but then, he's not Chinese, and not a taoist -- but VERY sung. So sung, he can demolish anyone who would use the slightest bit of force -- first by rendering the opponent as helpless as a newborn kitten, then gloating. I'd love for ChiDragon or you to spar with him. Can arrange it too if you're interested.

I think I may have something to offer -- have you seen Awake, a TV series whose main protagonist is an LAPD detective with severe PTSD who starts experiencing life in an unbelievable mysterious fashion? Sounds like your type, right? If you've seen it, I'd like to hear your opinion.

MM will hopefully give his own definition ('nuff putting this cat's words in his mouth ) but mine is rather simple. A real teacher of the traditional art of taiji comes from a traditional lineage of taiji and is qualified by his or her teacher to teach the art upon ascertaining that he or she has grasped it enough to teach it. This is transmission of lineage and it is always put in writing. If a teacher is illiterate (the way it was with the Chens for many generations before the current 12th-19th), he or she may not bother putting it in writing when teaching his or her own son or daughter, nephew or niece. If it's not a close blood relative, however, and the art is transmitted to an outsider, then someone literate will write it down at the teacher's request. That's all there is to it. Not every student of a particular lineage is qualified to teach it by any stretch of imagination. Especially today when a master may have hundreds or even thousands of students. Only a few of them will be getting the transmission of lineage though. The modern way to do it involves certification by your teacher and (sometimes) a group of other teachers, and you must fulfill specific requirements to get certified. This does not mean someone talented can't mix and match and improvise and create their own style. My teacher has created several. But when transmitting this new art, they don't call it "Chen taiji" or "Yang taiji" or "Wu taiji." Most of all they don't call it "just taiji." There's no such thing. They call it something and take responsibility for being the authors of what they've created and are willing to teach. They don't teach it as traditional taiji and they don't say that what this is is "traditional taiji' or "just" "taiji." So if you want to learn someone's new creative accomplishment, unproven by centuries of use, if it doesn't deter you that you're being experimented on as a student of this new unproven art, by all means, go to a teacher who teaches that, learn Jeet Kune Do or "Taoist taiji" or "Yin yang taiji" or whatever. My teacher teaches traditional taiji styles and his own creations, giving you a choice which ones you wish to learn. For traditional taiji styles, he has an endorsement from his teachers, in writing. For his own styles, he doesn't need it, he clearly states it is created by him, for such and such purposes that traditional taiji does not serve. E.g., he created Compact Taiji to be practiced in modern cramped up spaces, small apartments, offices, even cubicles. What's the purpose of creating something new just to satisfy one's ego? A new style has to have a new purpose. What's the new purpose of Jeet Kune Do that traditional taiji styles fail to serve? ??? His ego.

One of the founding fathers of this forum, Pietro, is Italian, but he hasn't been around in a while. The least neutral guy you'll ever meet. Love the Fudo avatar.