Taomeow

Yeah, food tourism! Another overlooked human advantage! Places you go -- everybody can go places, but a koala will still want eucalyptus leaves for breakfast, lunch and dinner no matter where he roams, and if there aren't any in a new place, he will rather die than try something else! There's definite disadvantages to being a specialist... I think plants think in sacred geometry, and then perhaps in Euclidean and Lobachevsky's too, they are absolute masters of geometry (and if we take Plato's word for it, as I tend to, to the effect that "god is a geometer," then they think way closer to god than we do.) Geometrical thinking (which I'm familiar with from those of my meditations that come out the very best hands down) does not rely on pictures -- much less numbers or words -- it's a direct influx of reality. "Images arise in the Creative (heaven) and take form in the Receptive (earth)," as Ta Chuan put it. Plants translate heaven-speak into earth-speak... and embody what they think. Knowing that can actually help a human read their minds. The Doctrine of Signatures was all about reading the plants' minds based on how they embody it. (Chinese medicine never lost that. A seasoned TCM master can tell what the qi of a plant will do in the human body by just looking at it.) Why thank you! While we're learning things from each other, could you please tell me what's that ponies thing about that everybody seems to know something about but me? I only know an old Russian song about a pony... here's a quick translation: The pony gives the girls a ride, the pony gives the boys a ride, the pony runs in circles counting circles in his mind! (Scotty would disagree I'm sure. )

I used to feel like that frog much of the time. Then I realized that the hand holding the bogus reality in front of me is itself bogus. No nourishment in biting it either. There's a classic taoist meditation for increasing yin, you meditate on mud, at nighttime, mentally sitting in black mud and gradually expanding it to submerge you and the world. I think they may have learned it from the practice peers of the Frog Taoist mentioned by Deng Ming-Dao in one of his books. Gonna try this approach someday.

I am a believer in (and a practitioner of) co-creation, so it's a no-brainer for me to decide whether consciousness is inside or outside. It's like riding a bicycle... is the skill to ride a bicycle inside or outside? Both and neither. You have to establish a relationship (co-create with the bike's geometry, gravity and the rest of those laws of physics both local and universal, your own body, your brain's ability to form, store, retrieve, and transmit back to the body muscle memories, which are "thoughts" of sorts, the ones your muscles are smart to understand or not, as well as the faster-than-cognition reflexes which, on the contrary, inform the brain of what they're doing only after they've already done it, and so on). Internal coherence is no measure of the quality of thinking, or cognition, or consciousness in general. My favorite example: an angry adult will win an argument against a scared child every single time. Does it mean he had a better argument every time? Does it mean he is right every time? Nope. I think the best thinking is done systemically, and when you engage enough systems, thoughts become peripheral, something more interesting -- way more interesting -- than thinking may be going on. Those are real meditations, not the ones where you succeed or fail stopping the mental chatter but the ones where your own mental chatter is like the three little hairs on your big toe -- you shave them off if you happen to notice them, but they so don't matter that if you don't shave them off, so what?.. You don't need to worry about worrying or not worrying about that. When the shoe fits, it fits with or without those three little hairs. When a human being (any being for that matter) works, thinking or not thinking can't make or break the deal. Long as thinking or avoidance of thinking (either one can be a sign of health OR unhealth, one would have to know more, to know what's the real -- hidden -- reason behind each concrete case) is not used as a substitute for the healthy operations of some other human systems (and an exceedingly poor substitute it is I should add), nothing's wrong with either scenario.

I think somehow I could see your wind-dancer made out of forest-branches. There's widespread folk beliefs that such things do exist. They are not unlike mermaids in their behavior, only they are of the forest rather than of the water. (A Ukrainian one is called a Mavka. A Japanese one, don't remember what it's called, likes to settle in little hidden Shinto shrines and can become offended if a traveler does not offer it something.) I don't care all that much for most of my thoughts either. They say 95% of everything on the internet is crap, but this is the outcome of 95% of everything in everyone's head, ditto. Maybe someone else's best thoughts and most golden inspirations would qualify as part of the 95% in my head, and then again my most brilliant ones would be, in some smarter head, chalked up to those 95% -- it's always about objective quantity, looks like, not subjective quality of one's thought process. I enjoy the 5% that are fun to have produced (or channeled, depending on whether one sees consciousness as residing inside or outside), but are they really worth putting up with the rest of it?.. Meditation, which someone here has recently questioned as "yet another addiction," may well be an addiction to cleanliness in one's mind. After a while, one starts noticing that thoughts, like everything else, create clutter. It does not matter if they are smart thoughts or dumb ones -- too much of anything equals clutter (orderly thinking is deceptive in this respect -- you don't notice the clutter in your innermost closets and drawers and attic and basement if you keep all working surfaces of your mind clean and tidy. Some of the best-organized minds prove to be the most cluttered ones if you dig deeper.)

"The latest discovery comes from Kew's Jodrell Laboratory, where they found that Paris japonica, a small, white flower from Japan, has the largest genome of any organism studied! The smallest genome yet reported (at least among eukaryotes, or organisms with nuclei enclosed in membranes) is found in an intestinal parasite (0.0023 picograms of DNA), and the human genome falls in between, at 3.0 picograms and 3 billion "letters" of DNA. The flower's genome is a whopping 150 billion letters long, making it 50 times the size of the human genome." So, what do you think this pretty white flower does with its staggering complexity 50 times exceeding our own?.. All we know about its inner life is that it does not cause it to speak English aloud (you can't be sure it doesn't speak it in its flowerhead though... ayahuasca made me speak Spanish with her "because that's what people speak here" and when I protested that I don't know it, she downloaded it into my head instantly -- and it lasted me three weeks, with some residual Spanish vocabulary of a couple hundred words still remaining operational to this day.) Oh, and another thing we know about Paris Japonica's (or a cucumber's) inner life is that they don't care for iced coffee... no wait, do we?.. HOW do we know?.. We "assume" and therefore don't offer them any. I'm going to ask the tomato plants I currently have if they care for some. (I don't, thank you, I prefer my coffee hot -- and strong enough to walk on its own.)

The greatest Sage I've met to date is a plant. In the rainforest, they say that underground, her roots permeate the whole of Amazon, connecting all life forms and communicating with everything, and that these roots can be ascertained, you could start digging and following them and they go everywhere in a never-ending network; but that she also has their invisible extensions going above and through and beyond the earth, tendrils that permeate the whole Solar system, the whole galaxy, other galaxies, and other dimensions -- the whole universe. She is connected to and is the connecting medium of all creation and all its creatures. A cucumber on acid you might say... except according to those who keep the score, in the classic shamanic preparation she's about 150 times stronger than acid, and nowhere near as pointless. I've been down one of those tendrils that she throws into the no-thing, and many others too. (Not limited to live and dead things, to being and nonbeing... there's machines and semi-machines there, and things they produce -- e.g., our this-here reality is a side effect of operations of one of those, a trickle-down manifestation of its functions... the universe if full of weird stuff, ten thousand times weirder than anything humanly weird...) So, anyone says something condescending about vegetables, I just LOS... the silent counterpart of LOL.

Thank you! How about some truffle oil? Over hamachi under avocado? Yum. Another item for the Food Judgment Day. Oh, and I'm partial to nigori sake, the cloudy unfiltered kind that you drink chilled, surprise surprise. Did you know that sake (and perhaps the Chinese versions of rice liquors too, but the study was with sake) is the only alcoholic beverage that produces rather than depletes Kidney Yin? This may well be the secret of all those long-playing masters who can drink buckets without losing their gong -- or their face. ...All in all, guys, some of you may have missed the point I was making. It's not about "superiority" to animals -- I am convinced, in the shamanic tradition, that we are NOT superior to any creatures great or small. It's not about "inferiority" either. Nor is it about greed, Marblehead, a gourmet does not equal a glutton. It's about things one can experience that are uniquely human. (No, I don't believe self-awareness, much less consciousness, is uniquely human. I know for a fact cucumbers have that. You would too if you spent a summer paying attention every day, watching what cucumbers do every day, for the whole duration of the season of their life. I planted them on an irregularly shaped little patch of soil in the back yard, some six feet away from a wooden fence. There was enough sun everywhere, but for reasons I didn't understand at first, I noticed that they all seemed to have decided they wanted to grow in the direction of the fence, regardless of how close or how far they happened to have started. So they all began moving in that direction, slowly but surely -- took them about a month to reach it -- I kept wondering why, then I saw it. The first cucumber plant to get to the fence threw a tendril over it like a lasso, wrapped it around the lower beam several times -- took it about three days -- then pulled itself up onto the fence! -- then threw another tendril over the higher beam, pulled itself up, and then threw a tendril to the next cucumber plant and helped it climb up! and that one helped the next, and the next, till they all spread themselves evenly all over the fence, side by side. Then they opened their flowers proudly, for all the pollinating insects to see, but later, when the actual cucumbers appeared, they did an excellent job of hiding them by hanging them off the fence and wrapping leaves over them on both sides. I've seen more than one perplexed squirrel sniff and sniff and look this way and that and jump on and off the fence dozens of times, and he couldn't find the cucumbers. I wouldn't know they were there either if I hadn't watched the process from the start -- not a single cucumber was visible from the street or from the yard. There they lived in peace, knowing I'd only take one or two at a time for a salad, and granting me the right in exchange for daily watering, by letting me see the one or two ready to go today -- literally moving some leaves aside as I approached so as to let me see one cucumber or two every day, here I am, I'm yours, thanks for all the water. It all looked like a lot of planning, foresight, cooperation, care, mastery -- none of it looked like "instinct," anymore than human behavior in choosing a residence by planning in advance, taking into consideration things like the safety of the neighborhood, the proximity of transportation, the access to jobs and friends -- it looked like a lot of conscious decision-making we erroneously think is reserved for our own kind. Cucumbers are absolutely sentient, self-aware, and full of complex inner life -- and so is everything else.) So, consciousness, no, self-awareness, no, these are not uniquely human. But truffle oil over hamachi is.

Don't know about the rest of the cats, can account for this one. Puss in boot camp. Trying to qigong and taiji more, now that the weather is online. Exploring the boulders piled up along the beach for their parkour potential. But I've got something for you privately, please stay tuned. In the heyday of my primal explorations, I discovered that 1. ALL significant agendas of theirs are hidden from ALL people, and 2. they are not really THEIR agendas, and 3. these hidden agendas are not mere thoughts and ideas and feelings, they actually have a physical counterpart in the brain -- structures erected to initiate and maintain them (neural networks with connections established and severed at the agenda's demand, in a fashion that has nothing whatsoever to do with the normal brain physiology -- the resulting brain cluttered with these structures and emptied out of the sound ones whose place they'd taken being perceived as "my very own" without actually being one's own or functioning toward one's best interest), and 4. of course it's not limited to the brain, the mind and the body are part of it -- they all run errands for hidden programs, and in many cases, it's all they do. I have no advice for people who are becoming aware of those installations. The cauldron in which I cooked my own elixir has been smashed, the recipe fed to the dragon and the tiger, the phoenix feather it had been written down with spontaneously self-immolated. But sometimes I see people who will probably cook a different one eventually, I don't know how and when, but I usually know who and more often than not, why. Though cats are known to have been wrong on occasion.

I think it's soully, a baby soul. Not Laozi's baby who hasn't learned to smile yet, but the "young soul" of infantile soli-psism that hasn't learned yet it's not the sole soul that matters. So it spends its time playing soli-taire, all the while informing other souls, the ones who have already grown up enough to learn to play with each other, that they don't know how.

Thank you, Mythmaker. Fascinating. For someone who has spent years with the I Ching, it's also a really cool way to glimpse the "other" relationship one can have with the oracle. (I found two or three paintings though that I would probably paint in a somewhat similar fashion -- e.g. The Abysmal, Possessing in Great Measure, Shock -- but most of them are, to me, unexpected, and great to explore.) The I Ching is a source of inspiration for me too (though its primary function in my life is traditional, that of an oracle), at some point I had this idea to write 64 short stories, each illustrating a situation from a hexagram... but, like Confucius, I would have to ask for another 50 years to dedicate solely to the project.

Excellent kungfu!

Nope. Here's a metaphor I once heard: when put in boiling water, an egg changes from soft to hard, a carrot changes from hard to soft, and coffee -- coffee -- changes the water! I change my mind like coffee. So, that post which I deleted because I've developed a habit of deleting my posts lately (here's how it happens: I write a post while my morning coffee is being consumed, my mind is not there to be changed yet... I don't know about everybody else but the no-mind state, to me, is the state you wake up in that lasts until the end of your first cup of coffee... so, then coffee kicks in, my mind returns, reads what I wrote while it wasn't there, instantly changes and tells me, hey, weren't you supposed to quit writing stuff here and do the writing elsewhere as you promised me you would?.. I go, oh, oops, sorry, I'll delete it, I won't do it again. That's the drill...)... ...as I was saying... that post had to do with doing a taiji form as a meditation and using the bare backbone of instructions as a mantra in order to prevent the mind from wandering away from what the body is doing... for which purpose I started arranging the instructions in a kind of rhythmic pattern. I posted the beginning of the resulting Song of Chen Laojia Yi Lu, but then changed my mind... But what's to stop me from changing it again? and again?

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=GHy1rFeBDzQ

Please sift through your dreams and help me put a certain two and two together...

They are related but it's Romanesco Cauliflower. When I first held it in my hands I simply couldn't believe my eyes. Sometimes tao doesn't bother with metaphors and just gives you the truth as is. The truth is beautiful and tastes good steamed, then pan-fried in butter.

I'm not doing it wrong just because you didn't see what I was doing. (OK, just on the surface, 11.01 has something to do with 3333 -- have you noticed?.. You can start familiarizing yourself with numerology with a neat little book titled Math for Mystics -- from there sky's the limit if you chose to get into more esoteric and fascinating sources. I've never seen Twilight Zone -- what's that about?)

Thanks. I didn't notice it. Now I also notice that I happened to submit post No. 3333 at 11.01. Believe me I didn't "choose" any of this -- IT chose to get posted AT THIS MOMENT. As for assuming that those who never get these dreams are less interested in participating -- why, it may have been true in a totally impersonal setting (the unrealistic one "scientific" studies create on purpose -- the purpose being to distort reality), but here, they might participate simply because I asked them to nicely, and they know that when THEY ask me nicely I am likely to respond just because nice people have asked, regardless of my level of interest in the subject matter.

Results so far: Do you get catastrophe dreams? Never (5 votes [17.86%]) Once or twice I had them (12 votes [42.86%]) I get them regularly (6 votes [21.43%]) I never used to, but recently I started getting them (or got one) (5 votes [17.86%]) If you get such dreams, what kind of catastrophe is it? Tsunami (5 votes [11.11%]) Earthquake (3 votes [6.67%]) Fire (2 votes [4.44%]) War (7 votes [15.56%]) End of the world (12 votes [26.67%]) Alien invasion (5 votes [11.11%]) Other (please specify) (6 votes [13.33%]) N/A (5 votes [11.11%]) So, people who answered "never" constitute under 18% of the respondents, i.e. over 82% do get such dreams. This makes catastrophe dreams absolutely archetypal for the human race as represented by TTB. A numerical tidbit that caught my eye -- % of tsunami, alien invasion, and N/A responses each came up to 11.11 (another archetype), fire to 4.44, and possibly of interest "other" to 13.33.

I think roughly the same thing as Laozi's "Know the white but keep/cherish the black." Or, "learn yang, return to yin." Or, "experience is the light but permanence is the darkness." Or, "light is a manifestation of god, darkness is god." Or, "after you flip the switch off, the light is gone, the tao remains." Nice one. Reminded me of something I read in a book written by an African shaman who was kidnapped by a Jesuit priest as a small child and educated in the white man's boarding school for "reforming the savages." Eventually, some nine or ten years later, he escaped and returned to his native village. He remembered very little of his early upbringing and had a solid colonial education. His own people couldn't understand him more often than not, but the biggest riddle was his keeping some candles lit in his room at night right until he went to bed. His relatives and neighbors were trying to find out the reason for his avoidance of darkness. They puzzled over it and couldn't fathom it. "Darkness is the heart and soul of life -- why must you rip it out? Why are you violent like that?"

Anyone familiar with this style? Any practitioners? Opinions? Thanks in advance!

Thanks everyone! This seems quite plausible, thank you. Tongbei does strike me as a very old art, and very natural at that. I've seen cats fight like that. The paws go like a windmill, the back is open, shoulders work like pumps -- they don't raise them even a millimeter as they go (and neither should we ), so nothing is pinched or closed in the way of the force from the back. Of course they can do this with their hind legs too. Did you hear it from someone who challenged a tongbei practitioner and got his ass kicked, by any chance?

Cat and Suninmyeyes, those are pretty impressive premonitions. In fact, things like the ones you describe should cause a major re-evaluation of any worldview that does not allow for shamanic sciences. I dreamed of a tsunami a couple of nights before I asked -- it's unusual for me to get this kind of a dream, so I wanted to see if the collective dream-consciousness contains any clues as to why I had it. The dream was a fractal-like one and I discerned meanings on several levels: 1. The most mundane -- I lost track of my pillow in my sleep and was sleeping in an awkward position, pressing the top of my head into the headboard at an angle that was straining my neck. In my dream, a great big green-tinted, and actually very beautiful, tsunami wave came from the ocean and submerged the town. I live a mile away from the ocean in real life, and the setting was absolutely realistic -- but the house is on a steep hill above the ocean, the whole mile goes up and up, so any tsunami that would reach it would be an extinction level event, to say nothing of the fact that we never get them to begin with. In my dream, Water had pity on me and the wave curved at the bottom as it reached my dwelling, creating an air pocket where I could stay and wait it out, but in a very uncomfortable cramped-up position, with a strained neck and with awareness of all the weight of millions of tons of the ocean above my head. 2. An explicit birth memory dream. If I get one of those, it's a sign I'm stressed out at a deep level in excess of mundane everyday stress, or else am about to embark on some new and uncharted territory in my life, or both. 3. A larger context -- a sense of the world being "flooded" with forces it can neither control nor contain (not necessarily actual water, a "flow of novelty" as Terence McKenna would put it, of a dangerous kind). 4. A still larger context -- the ocean is mighty pissed (what happened in Japan is one recent reason, out of many) and won't contain its emotions for much longer. 5. A still larger one -- it's Time itself, sweeping-away time, some different kind, Time swelling like a tsunami wave, pregnant with a cleanse or with wrath, or both. That's what prompted me to ask.

I don't follow that thread, but now's a good time to mention that I like you way more than Nietzsche. I read him as a teenager, and my impression was he's not unlike those of my peers who were trying too hard to be cool or hot or hip or whatchumacallit. Today he would wear a pair of the most expensive and tightest jeans, of the kind that deprive a boy's manhood of circulation.

Nietzsche's every thought is perched beside him on that fence between neurotic and psychotic where a borderline personality spends his whole melodramatic life. Zhuangzi is triumphantly sane, one of those minds that thrive on the whimsical and quirky and even outrageous manifestations of sanity which people who don't have a solid foundation of mental stability shouldn't attempt unless their goal is to sounds pompous, contrived, and every which way ridiculous. If Zhuangzi was a bird (rather than the butterfly he really was), he would have been a nightingale who sings at four in the morning, for the song's sake, enjoying what he can do with his voice and caring not whether anyone is listening. If Nietzsche was a nightingale, he would have been a stuffed one.

Friend, thanks for the analysis and the videos. Oh, and the poem! The master from China is only visiting for a short while, so he won't have a chance to "beat it into me," only teach, and then it's up to me to beat it into myself. I agree that honing one form is better than learning many -- well, at least for me, I'm such a slow learner. But the more I watch tongbei quan, the more I keep falling in love. (That's how my relationship with Chen started too, I never felt compelled to learn any other styles... even though there's so much argument among practitioners, all the way to the top, and people of great repute told me, bah humbug, the real thing is Yang... or Wu... or baguazhang... or whatever. But of course we chensters stand our ground... rooted. ) What about you -- do you practice something (or everything?)