Taomeow

That's a theory I'm familiar with. To my knowledge, no one has any definitive proof, but it does not seem impossible, sure thing. What do you mean by "traditional shaman" -- in what tradition? I have studied shamanism, been exposed to several traditions and initiated into one, they are pretty different... Yes, a shaman can write a book, 'tis true... I read every book by every shaman who cared to write one I could lay my hands on, but it's like an auto mechanic writing a book about the car transmission -- the book does not transmit the spark... or like a candle maker writing a book about all kinds of flames candles can produce but not giving you the matches... catch my drift?

Thank you, Steve. Don't great minds think alike? And I agree about Rainy_Day -- hey RD, delighted to have you here, you may be a newcomer to TTB but definitely not to cognitive cultivation (and perhaps other kinds too? ) -- do stick around!

What's the rationale behind answering a question with a question? and referencing a Chinese text in response to a question from someone who never claimed Chinese proficiency? Yes, you are lucky you can read Chinese, it has been established. I can read most European languages, but I don't respond to you in Bulgarian or Greek, do I? Do you want me to?

I'll tell you what could reconcile the one author/multiple authors and one lifetime/much longer period of creation (hundreds of years or more) controversy. If it was indeed a shamanic text, not that such a thing exists (what IS a shamanic text is not a text -- Hetu and Luoshu are shamanic documents, the trigrams are, the hexagrams minus the commentaries, the bone oracles, even the archaic "radicals" in their original form of inscription, etc. -- shamanism will use symbols to encapsulate some important notions but is the antithesis to writing things down that are merely words, because memory is its main tool and committing things to live human memory, its most vital method. That's because the remembering soul -- and even the DNA -- is sturdier than papyrus, paper, or computer drives. MUCH more reliable.) -- where was I? -- oh, "if it was a shamanic text." As I was saying, the only way TTC could be a shamanic text would be if it somehow followed the shamanic tradition of transmitting the whole spirit of the shaman to his or her chosen disciple upon death. This was the standard practice of, e.g., many varieties of Siberian and Mongolian shamanism. The new shaman, upon receiving the whole of the old one's teachings in the form of the totality of his/her "professional" spirit, became that shaman, one and the same, different body, same body of teachings and practices. So it is possible that "Laozi" stands for that spirit transmitted from one author to the next -- different authors, different humans, same divine "Laozi" inhabiting their minds and guiding their hands to write a continuous narrative of The Way and Its Power. How's that?

I'm pretty sure I've read the Zhang Sanfeng one. Don't remember who the preserver was though. It was short and to the point. Very useful. What about the version you reference -- is it also very short or am I only familiar with a small part of something bigger?

I absolutely agree. Chinese culture seems to have avoided divorcing conceptual thought from living practice (which is what philosophy is -- which is ALL it is) for much longer than our own. Yup. True again. It took about three hundred years of being humiliated with defeats stemming from a non-military non-technological focus of the culture, but finally Chinese intellectuals decided that they are in the wrong and must adopt the ways of the victor. Some of them good, others not so good, still others, pretty darn atrocious, but beggars weren't choosers, at some point it became an almost all-or-nothing deal, so "all" is what was swallowed so as not to be disintegrated into "nothing." It wasn't a choice, it was Pavlovian conditioning. Only time will tell if it was irreversible. I doubt it, China is too old, too "heng," too set in her ways, three hundred years of doing things a bit (or a lot) differently is nothing, a bump in the road. I think...

TTC is definitely many things, and was probably written by several authors, over an extended period of time, according to (e.g.) D.C. Lau the comparative philosopher (and one of the best and most accurate translators and interpreters of the text I've come across). Its shamanic consciousness (undeniable in some chapters, nonexistent in others), philosophical and cosmological forays, alchemical coding, taiji instructions, etc., however, pale before its main message -- a set of admonitions addressed to the ruler, to the powerful, to the overlord, father of the family or father of the nation. (NOT to the disenfranchised who read this book from an erroneous platform of an illusion of their own power and consequently take to heart what shouldn't concern them. The oppressed human being is a defensive in-denial animal as a default state, always finding ways to identify with the perpetrator instead of feeling like a victim, which would be the only honest and possibly eventually productive but pretty terrifying prospect for most people who have ever been alive in post-shamanic "civilized" times. Hence the fecklessness of the message -- the ruler is not interested, and the ruled is barking up the wrong tree when quoting this or that chapter or passage.) This central message is undeniably post-shamanic, since shamanic cultures of prehistory were overwhelmingly (and in deep prehistory exclusively) matriarchal, so the issue wasn't there. A religious interpretation, a later acquisition (Laozi as a deity, and at that as extremely patriarchal as the happy gay family of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that excludes Mother from the process of divine creation) seems to be derived from the overall zeitgeist (of the period, not to be confused with the popular online movie) rather than from the text proper. I.e. Laozi (and other authors, of which he may or may not have been one) never deifies himself in this work, to his credit.

Alas, that's exactly the case, far as I can tell. There's no word for "privacy" in Russian, e.g.. (I'm almost sure there's no such word in Chinese either.) This can have monumental cultural implications both ways, I mean, having such a word or not having it. An even bigger problem is an abundance of words that refer to made-up nonexistencies. They stand for something that isn't. Their only function is to mess up everyone's perceptions and they do a very good job, consistently. But worst of all are abbreviations. A historian once noted that every civilization that is about to go violent, totalitarian, or collapse starts using many abbreviations. They are symptomatic of major disconnections between phenomena, perceptions, and language used to describe them. Abbreviations don't have a feeling/sensing counterpart resonating with anything tangible or subtle anywhere in the human psyche, on top of being meta-symbolic. Meta-symbolism is usually bad news. Reality twice (or more) removed. Everybody losing touch. The Roman empire in decline is where they invented them I think, but I would have to check on Mesopotamia before asserting it with certainty. British tolerance for subtlety and ambiguity is way higher than USAnian. The islanders don't mind it when things are implied, if not prefer it. Americans insist on everything being spelled out, like in a legal contract.

The way USAnians speak is not unlike that Chen taiji move -- "walk obliquely in twist steps" -- backwards at that. "She is gooood" is how you comment on her doing something devious. Alternatively, "she's baaaad" means high praise. The ubiquitous "cool" -- well, what does it mean if you think about it? Effortlessly tepid? Nonchalantly cold-blooded?.. But what they/we say (well, I only half belong) is nowhere near as revealing as what they/we don't say because there's no way provided to say it. At home I speak two languages within one sentence on a regular ongoing basis because there's no AmerEnglish for what I need to express. E.g., how do you ruffle up a cat with passion and gusto saying all the necessary words if all there is is "why-I-ought-to?..." -- which bores the cat after three repetitions?..

Beautiful! I think everybody got it wrong -- the tight controllers and the anything-goers alike. It's always either "too much" or "not enough" and never "just right." A friend of mine once said musing on his upbringing, "I wouldn't know normal if it donned a polka dot bikini, climbed up on the table in my living-room and danced cancan singing, 'happy smiling Normal is here at last!..' " Still, I think for a cultivator, going to extremes is mandatory for a while -- how else would one know where the balance lies if not between the extremes?.. Where you stand vis a vis those "too much" and "not enough" ends of the scale?.. In fact, "Tales of the Taoist Immortals" tell stories of some outrageous characters, including a guy who lived his life like an ancient Chinese counterpart of a modern rock star... in the end it turned out he WAS a star, not a rock star but a real star from the sky who chanced upon a human incarnation and retained all the habits of being a star, which busted all accepted norms of behavior -- all he knew how to do was shine right in your face! I guess it might be about "follow your true nature" -- whatever that happens to be... but before one figures out what that is, there's layers and layers of "too much" and "not enough" stuff from someone else (parent, teacher, preacher, doctor, cop, etc.) to stop mistaking for "me" and shed...

Yup. The bridge.

Actually, no, it won't if done with care. I've been doing it for years, but a bit differently from the picture: pushing up with the soles of the feet, not the toes; arms outstretched on the floor, not supporting the body (this additional twist gives the body the task to find its own balance instead of propping it up with the arms/hands -- in the latter case you can get away with many tensions still "hidden" and not released, but if you don't use your arms, you have to really relax in a "sung" fashion, to borrow a taiji term, i.e. not limp like a noodle but relaxed like a steel spring under no pressure); awareness held in the Jade Pillow area -- this gently rolls out micro-kinks in the neck and then the deeper ones; I follow up by bringing my feet down to the floor behind my head, straight, no knee bending, this rolls out the kinks between the neck and the shoulders and stretches the spine nicely; and all of it either with natural breathing or with ujai breath, not abdominal, since the neck is somewhat "bypassed" with abdominal breathing but ujai involves it.

Very true. In fact, living in one and the same range of consciousness all the time, and a very narrow one at that, is neither traditional nor healthy, apparently. Traditionally, even the most regulated, strict and stern societies, let alone the freer ones, had occasions when all everyday rules were temporarily cancelled and everybody let it all hang out -- carnivals, celebrations, ecstatic inducement with music, drums, fireworks, drinking and/or partaking of this or that entheogen, going absolutely wild, inviting possession by spirits and saints and forces of nature, on and on. We are the first society in history that has nothing to offer in this regard except hooliganism at football games or occasional riots without a clue. In fact, hooliganism and riots are nothing more than the natural response to the absence of wild carnivals and ecstatic immersion where being free with abandon is expected rather than punished. Humans are, by design, not necessarily meek, not necessarily timid. The opposite is not violence and irresponsibility. The opposite is spontaneity and freedom of expression, and humans who don't have too much pent-up unexpressed spontaneity and freedom don't go overboard at the first occasion to release it, but those who do, do. So we're in a set-up created for us, not by us, where any regular release of the sense of freedom is forcibly prevented and where herded sheep behavior is the only one acceptable for all purposes on all occasions. They can't trust artificial sheep to express themselves as humans or they might not want to go back to being make-believe sheep, god forbid. Might LIKE being human, so help us. And then, what do you do if your heart that you're always expected to keep in the sheep range harbors a particularly stubborn tigress who just won't turn belly up and die as prescribed... who growls and growls, hey, I'm not a vegetarian?..

Here's what I have from a responsible source -- a long-time disciple who started learning from Master Wang in the 1980's when two of his teachers were alive (now only one is): Teacher Wang Jiaoming is alive and his present age is 122. Teacher Zhang Hodao left the world in 2001 at the age of 119. Teacher Gu Jiaoyi left the world "under unclear circumstances" in 1978-9(?) at the age of 86-87(?)

That's exactly what I was thinking today when Google came out with a petition to congress to sign by those who oppose SOPA and PIPA. They just want to know who you are, see. But maybe not in order to create better-crafted bills. Maybe to blacklist you. For, you know, a later date. Paranoia will save ya.

Green -- with all of them. I've read a book by a Burkina Faso shaman who described his initiation, a 6-week long most intensive no-breaks life-endangering ordeal (which, typically, some of the prospective initiates do not survive) comprised of the most unimaginable out-of-this-world experiences (of which he revealed some but by far not all). One of the tasks the elders give the prospective initiate is to see a tree. They "see" which one, point it out to him, and then he is supposed to look at that tree since dawn and till he "truly sees it." He didn't get it. He was watching this tree for hours while the elders were watching him, and all he saw was the tree. It was very hot and very boring. He was naked and had no water and no shade. He made up a story about seeing something or other at one point, so as to get the elders to relent and let him off the hook. They just laughed when he described whatever he made up trying to pretend he "saw" it, and told him to keep looking. More hours of looking. And then all of a sudden he saw... The tree was not a tree at all. It was a lady, all green, divinely beautiful, with green garments, green skin, green eyes, green light surrounding her, and the light was love, not "universal love" but love for him personally, divine love of the green world all focused on him. He rushed into her arms and embraced her. She whispered words of love in his ear, she whispered secrets of the universe in his ear, she filled him with green wisdom. He wanted to stay like that forever, he was complete, accomplished, happier than he ever thought possible. But after a while she told him he had to go back, against his protests, and gently disentangled herself from his embrace and all of a sudden he was standing there hugging a tree. The sun had already set. The elders approached him and said, well done, boy. Now go back to the camp. He did -- heartbroken over losing the love of his eternity. He had green dreams on a few more occasions after that, and the green lady came again to tell him some more secrets. He asserts the experience changed who he is and how he sees the world forever.

Mine is #17 http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

Yup, and a sugar-delivery line for the sugar-coated painkilling-with-serotonin society. I always cite that George Carlin line -- "the more complex the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole." Coffee in those coffee shops, however, is not real, like everything else intended for mass consumption. You know, real coffee is not "caffeine," it's hundreds of synergistic substances, plants are complex and smart... and there's rules of engagement for interacting with them. Ginseng, you don't expose to direct fire under the pot, there's always a double boiler involved or you lose half or more of its medicinal potency. Coffee... well, I've a thread on coffee in "Off Topic" if interested. I've noticed you often post close to my own understanding on emotional issues. I believe, however, that "self calming" is secondary. First thing that happens in a child's life is the message that it's not OK to be angry, sad, or otherwise too explicitly emotional. Then we are taught it's not OK to know WHAT it is exactly we feel, we are taught to swap what is acceptable (e.g. "calm") for what we really feel till we lose the sheer ability to accurately identify the feeling. Next stage -- unable to feel at all. Just go through the motions of displaying whatever passes for "feelings" that has been coached into you to display. The root of not some but all evils, this...

Don't know about #6 but definitely not #5, and coffee actually enhances one's cognitive ability, by preserving one's dopaminergic pathways and effectively making people smarter and keeping them that way longer (elderly coffee drinkers have 30 IQ points over non-drinkers), which is why the real conspiracy in full swing is to lie to the public about its detrimental effects while keeping silent about its healthy properties. They haven't come out with a prohibition yet (though they did in the past, e.g. in Germany at one point, also in Turkey, where the sultan who ordered all supplies of coffee in the land confiscated and thrown into the Bosphorus caused an uprising and wound up sewn into a burlap sack and thrown into the Bosphorus himself... way to go Turks!) but they do everything to undermine the health benefits of coffee by making everybody who drinks it feel guilty and believe erroneously (but efficiently, since a belief that something is harmful is a strong nocebo) that they are destroying themselves. Well, give them a finger and sip on, brother, rock on.

Conspiracy theoirsts is a label used by 1. Coincidence theorists -- to describe everyone else. They themselves have no power of integration, information comes to them chopped up to unmatching bits and leaves shredded, they never put two and two together. If two and two suddenly add up to four in their minds, they call it a coincidence and try to forget all about it immediately. 2. People who have no knowledge of history. Those who have studied history know that it runs on conspiracies ONLY, propelled by no other fuel. Example: Buddhism flourished in China due to a conspiracy between wealthy landowners to build Buddhist monasteries and temples and conspire with the monks and priests to use large parts of the lands they granted for the purpose for their own farming and other profit-fetching activities, since temple and monastery lands were tax exempt while the rest of the lands were heavily taxed by the emperor. A T'ang dynasty emperor cracked the conspiracy and cracked down on Buddhism, destroying and closing the temples to eliminate this tax loophole. That's when taoism reached its peak of strength, and that's why: the competition were caught red-handed in a conspiracy, so the non-conspiring party briefly had a chance to go about its business unimpeded. Not for long, of course. All of our civilized history is like that -- if you dig an inch deeper than the surface, you know the reason why something happened or failed to happen: there was a conspiracy. If you think otherwise, you haven't studied our civilized history. 3. People who need to feel superior to someone on the merit of a label being available that belittles them. "Conspiracy theorist" is a convenient label -- you call someone that and you feel good about yourself because, well, you have established your superiority. 4. Repeaters of repeaters who know nothing about nothing but are equipped with the parrot's knack for repeating many times whatever they've heard many times. What everybody hears many times is propaganda. Conspiracies go unannounced. Parrots repeat what is being announced and don't (can't) repeat what isn't ringing in everybody's ears. 5. Mental midgets with no cognitive ability. 6. Agents provocateurs. 7. Agents of totalitarian control and repression. Enforcers of "yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die" social values and behavior. I hope I'm not missing anyone?

If you come teach a bit closer to our neck-of-woods, I'll do my best to provide my share of entertainment. Does physical eyesight affect this ability? Mine is imperfect. I do see weird "stuff" on occasion. It started years ago when I was doing natural eyesight improvement thingies and was experimenting with many different modes of seeing. Some from books and some from dreams, and then some spontaneous discoveries. I can switch on the second sight and see grids of qi superimposed on everything, e.g. orderly patterns of lights guiding the trees how to grow, all kinds of funky stuff. But I have never used this on people, because I'm in an altered state when I perceive this, and turning my attention to a person in order to communicate busts it instantly. I can either communicate or see, in other words. Weird, huh?

I thought chakras were taught classically as being of particular colors, not new-ageyly? Of course they are part of a pretty absolutist system in their own right. But dantiens, too. The lower elixir field is invariably yellow or gold in taoist alchemical literature. I think there's two things going on here. Normal and abnormal. Classical literature describes "normal," and normal will be orderly, Water-Black-Blue-North on the bottom, Fire-Red-South on top, Metal-White-West on the right, and so on, all the Eight Directions are associated with the colors of their vibration. Then what a healer comes across is what's in need of healing, i.e. not what is normal. Of course there's no absolutes there. As Leo Tolstoy put it (more or less -- translating from memory), all happy families are happy the same way, all unhappy ones are unhappy in all kinds of unique ways. Well, I guess if by "conventional TCM" you mean the way it is taught in modern TCM establishments... but originally, they don't seem to have been separated. I think it may be a matter of what the healer himself/herself is trained to focus on or chooses to focus on. I know a TCM doctor reputed as one of the best TCM diagnosticians in China, who mostly diagnoses from the colors in the face, a quick pulse reading, and on occasion, turns on his auric vision if necessary. His student/assistant told me one of the stories... a patient came, the doctor said, you have such and such imbalances (in TCM terms), do this and that. The patient goes, doctor, are you sure you're not missing anything? The doctor, surprised, says, OK, turns on his auric vision and looks from a different dimension (for lack of a better term) and goes, "oh, that's right, to put it differently, since you already have a Western diagnosis, I can put it in these terms too. You have a brain tumor." Anybody's guess what a Western diagnosis looks to a "second sight," but the patient did not inform the doctor he had it (testing him I guess) yet it didn't remain hidden, and I guess that's what matters -- to see "what's going on" -- while what terms to use to name it (or how to interpret the colors) is not as important as to notice it and do something about it?..

There's crap both ways -- new age crap and skeptical crap. What do the colors of the rainbow mean? Different frequencies, different wavelengths, different properties of light. Do different properties of light signify different actions exerted? TCM and Ayurveda alike use light and color therapy based on these properties and actions -- e.g., you use red light to deeply penetrate the tissues under treatment, blue light to soothe an inflammation, and green to aid the ailing eyes. Auras are of different colors because the color of the light is meaningful, not because new agers or skeptics have opinions based on nothing other than what they concocted in their heads without any references to reality. To wit, different colors in the aura signify different properties of the light emitted. People experienced in observing many (those who see them at will or involuntarily, and those who study them with, e.g., Kirlian photography) may or may not learn to interpret what they see correctly, but only because it's a bit more involved than learning to tell what the red light on an intersection means vs. the green. It is, however, every bit as meaningful. Here's a story related by a guy who knows what they mean: he was giving a talk on auras to a scientific group of interested skeptics organized by his twin brother, a Ph.D. biochemist with no aura-seeing ability, who put together an audience of his peers, research scientists and doctors and the like. The aura-reading guy told the audience that his skill was an art rather than a science, apparently, "because right now I'm looking at the gentleman in the third row on the right and I distinctly see the pink color permeating his aura, which I've always seen in pregnant women only, and thought that's what it signifies, but obviously I was wrong." The man in the third row jumped up in great excitement and yelled, "this is incredible, and this is REAL!!!" "What do you mean?" He explained that he is a fertility researcher, very involved and very dedicated to his work, and that he devised some procedure that apparently was at a stage of great promise, and while waiting for some decisive results, the morning of that very day he was discussing his research with a colleague and, among other things, told him, "I've been thinking about it day and night, having these images of eggs and sperm doing this and that in my mind's eye all the time, and then doing this and that to get them to interact, and you know what, I positively feel pregnant! That's the best way I can describe my state -- I walk around feeling pregnant!" So, what do you guys make of the story?

Thank you very much! Look forward to reading it.

Oh, and on the subject proper. Master Wang Liping's routine is great, but requires really strong legs, otherwise it's pretty difficult. I keep promising myself to start standing ZZ again before resuming, otherwise I get too distracted by the burning in my thighs. It's a superb routine actually, coordinating everything with everything -- left-right, up-down, breathing-dantiens, and then all of it with all of it of the tree. I think someone recently posted an approximate (automatic and therefore very hard to understand) translation of the write-up of the routine somewhere on the forum, the original at some Chinese language Longmen site. Lao Tzu, Chi Dragon, everybody proficient in Chinese, if you wanted to make yourselves really sublimely useful and earn much gratitude from the forum's participants, you could perhaps offer a good translation? How does that sound?