Taomeow

A friend of mine who's a psychiatrist at a large mental hospital in New York had one (ONE) patient in the past fifteen years who attributed her falling off the rocker to meditating too much, and thousands (THOUSANDS) of patients who are devout Christians. I can give your dad her number for verification.

Absolutely. Meditation is a deliberate choice of where to place your awareness. Compare, e.g., to watching a movie: your awareness follows what your eyes are looking at and what your ears are hearing, it runs along a pre-selected rut set by someone else for your awareness to follow. Compare to reading a book: your awareness follows the narrative, words, sentences, thoughts of someone else. Compare to playing tennis: your awareness follows the ball hit by someone else's racket. Compare to having a headache, the flu, a broken rib: your awareness follows the pain, you didn't choose to follow the pain with your awareness, the pain has chosen for you where your awareness will dwell. Compare to having a conversation... to getting drunk... to spacing out... to sleeping... to eating on the run while thinking of something unrelated... to hundreds and thousands of things people do every day without unifying their mind with their body, their body with their spirit, their body-mind-spirit with the Great Beyond. One function of meditation is unification -- of your body with your mind, your mind with your spirit, your feelings with your life, your life with the life of the universe. As the immortal Sun Bu-er put it, "rest your mind on your breathing and your breathing on your mind." Why? Because when your mind is in one place and your breathing in another, without one paying any attention to what the other is doing, it's like applying the gas pedal and the brakes simultaneously -- all your life. Neither one can ever rest properly. Your body, mind, spirit, emotions, feelings constantly struggle with each other. Meditation offers them a truce. Another, more advanced function of meditation is what in the shamanic tradition and in some taoist ones alike is called "the horse" -- the means of transportation. You use it to transport your awareness to realms and dimensions beyond this one. Now if you follow a path of a lineage that went to these realms before you, the road might be charted. That's alchemical meditation, leading your awareness to other realms and dimensions and transformational events that can only take place there along a charted path. Then there's uncharted meditations, for the adventurous. In most cases, they don't take you too far, or to the right place, but they are useful to the same extent as aimless random "seeking" is useful in everyday reality for an adolescent who doesn't know yet who or what he or she is really after and is trying to "find oneself." They are beginners' stuff, in other words. Advanced meditations can be very demanding. You put your awareness through a boot camp -- and it becomes strong, disciplined, and spontaneously creative. Without such training, most modern people's awareness is at the mercy of whatever is thrown its way, whatever sticks. It is, in a typical case, a god-awful mess.

I'm still waiting for you to name at least ONE of those Ancient Chinese Books that you keep mentioning. To explain how at least some of the foreigners operate so as to avoid misunderstandings brought about by our linguistic limitations: the most ancient Chinese book on record, the primary one (recognized by ALL taoist sects and schools, unlike hundreds of other taoist books which some sects revere while others disdain, and vice versa), and the first one to have been included in the Taoist Canon, is the I Ching. I have the Eranos (Riksema/Sabbadini) translation which includes ALL meanings of ALL Chinese words used in the original text, not just modern but historic, obsolete, ancient, and thoroughly unfamiliar to ALL modern Chinese speakers except for scholars who are both linguists, historians, and taoists. So that's the version I use for divination. Since, you know, that's what the ancient Chinese primary use of this ancient Chinese book has been for thousands of years: not for reading, but for hands-on applications as an oracle, and then studying the meaning of the hexagrams, the lines, the images, the symbols formed by particular configurations, the commentaries (including the Ta Chuan, the Great Treatise, another most excellent ancient Chinese book which is not misunderstood by someone who has a bit of math and a bit of training in sacred geometry, feng shui, and Chinese astrology, which I do). And so on. This is PART of what taoists do. I do other things too. Pretty much all taoist arts, sciences and practices I can lay my hands on. Including, of course, but not limited to, of course, taoist meditation. So, you want to teach folks what is and isn't the good old taoist way? WALK it, pal. Just being able to read Chinese does not quite get one there -- wasn't Mao Zedong pretty good at that? -- and by the same token, being a foreigner does not quite stop one from getting there. Word.

Please see my response to you in your other thread -- Qi Gong

Lao Tzu, since you are new here, please let me offer you a bit of heads-up as to what this forum is for. This is where we discuss taoist arts, sciences and practices and also various subjects of interest to taoist practitioners, dabblers, and sympathizers. Opinions substantiated by clearly pointing out their sources (persons or groups, studies courses or books or videos, etc.), or else elaborating on one's own experience (practice, outcomes, teachers, encounters, observation of events and/or participation in them, etc.), or else coming at the end of one's own train of thoughts (musings, insights, tackling philosophical problems, mindful focusing on the personal or on the universal in order to assess a phenomenon under scrutiny, inspiration, emotional involvement with the subject or its detached clinical dissection, etc. etc. etc.) are most welcome. Opinions that are not, not. Just making empty declarations is, um, boring. I believe your goal in posting is the opposite of boring your readers, right? -- you are in fact trying to offer original, striking ideas, right?.. Well, I'm sure you are fully capable of doing this, if you take into consideration what I have just pointed out to you. Make your opinions worth our while and your effort in expressing them will not be wasted.

"When complexity strikes, meaningful statements lose precision and precise statements lose meaning." -- Lotfi Zadeh (father of the mathematical theory of fuzzy logic) But back to the subject: don't recall Master Wang saying anything about listening to your heartbeat. There's several parts to the sitting, the simple and the not-so-simple. The part where you just sit, you just sit. If you listen to your heartbeat or whatever, you are using the prop of a "something" to focus on. This is not how it's done in this tradition. When you just sit, you just sit. You let it all settle down. Settle. You don't move because if you move it gets stirred up and you've wasted your time. You don't focus on anything because if you do it settles where you focus instead of where tao settles in stillness. You gather your spirit inside, so you don't use your eyes to look at anything, you don't use your ears to listen to anything, you don't use anything.

Can treat malaria, induce spontaneous abortion, and cause temporary deafness -- which of these effects are you looking for?

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Thank you, Mark! Getting my piles of files organized is a new year's resolution of mine... so when I figure out what's going on where, I'll give it a try.

My profile pic is of me in full lotus in front of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an. (I tried to post a bigger version here but couldn't figure out how.) Notice the fractal formed by the larger shape of the pagoda replicated on the smaller scale of the lotus pose. There's a lot of similar ideas in taoist practices and Chinese architecture. You want a sturdy solid foundation and then you can golden-ratio the rest of your structure above it, and the overall effect is 'heng,' staying power. (The bright orange spot to the side is my bag, which adds modernistic asymmetry I think. )

Well, the vapor is a side effect (to watch out for though, as any cook knows, for if too much of it escapes, you burn what you've been cooking, and if too little, you may end up with a dish that's too watery... did you know, e.g., that boiled potatoes need to be "de-vaporized" when ready or else you will never know what a superior potato tastes like? -- an ancient trick ). It's not the vapor that you are trying to produce (unlike in all those anti-matter modalities bent on insubstantial pursuits), it's the Pill. The Pill contains the roaring tigress and the soaring dragon. It contains a passionate embrace of yin by yang. It contains a scale in perfect balance, holding eternity in exquisite equilibrium, and a spark to throw it off. It contains the beauty of order and the power of disorder. It contains non-duality within duality, and vice versa. Darkness within darkness, as Laozi put it, without making a peep about the light of "enlightenment," a non-taoist pursuit. The inside of the Pill is dark. The outside shines. Taoists don't have a problem with duality until they mingle with Buddhists who have mingled with the Hindu Advaita gang. That's because wuji is not a destination, it's a gas station where tao refills her tank before zipping off on her magnificent way of power.

It depends on whether the person perceiving danger is perfectly healthy or not. A perfectly healthy system gears toward a fight-or-flight response. Digestion stops, the stomach, liver and pancreas shut down the enzymes, the blood is diverted from the inner organs to the muscles and skin, the adrenal glands sharply elevate the production of adrenalin, the electrochemical activity of the brain switches to "red alert" and is directed outward, breathing rate increases and so does the depth of breath, heart rate increases, pumping the blood to where it's needed, the pores open to facilitate rapid circulation and cooling off (sweat glands get ready too), blood pressure temporarily spikes, parasympathetic activities are aborted and sympathetic ones are activated, the senses sharpen, production of endorphins, serotonin, and other internal painkillers and opiates is aborted, the dopaminergic axis is activated, insulin production shuts down, blood sugar spikes and a generous portion of glucose is directed to the brain, and so on -- in other words, true yang emerges, true yin hides. A perfectly unhealthy system gears toward a freeze response. Butterflies in the stomach, a sinking feeling, rumbling, diarrhea, etc., indicate a failure to properly redirect digestive energies in emergency, the system is confused as to what it is supposed to do. The blood is diverted from the muscles and skin to the internal organs -- one grows pale, with cold clammy skin, and weak. That's because a confused system does stuff bass ackwards. The adrenals sharply elevate the production of cortisol, internal painkillers and opiates kick in in an attempt to create a make-believe reality where the danger is not there and not real, the electrochemical activity of the brain switches to "go to sleep, if you don't notice what's going on it's not going on," breathing becomes shallow, heart rate may or may not cooperate and will either slow down abnormally or go into palpitations (a confused system does not match the responses of different organs to each other), senses grow dull, creating unreal dreamlike perceptions, the dopaminergic axis quits, blood sugar drops, blood pressure drops, sympathetic activities are aborted and parasympathetic ones take over, and so on -- in other words, true yang hides, false yin emerges. Then there's many variations -- e.g., a healthy system responding to perceived danger on an ongoing basis (chronic stress) -- you may have false yang emerge in this situation, exhausting true yin; an unhealthy system responding to perceived danger that is internally rather than externally motivated (chronic neurosis) -- you will have false yin emerge (depression) and true yang hide. And so on.

I'd love to see it! -- is it photogenic, this tattoo of yours, any pics? Here's a story of an involuntary/accidental tattoo with unexpected implications. When my grandmother was young, she was what one may call an emancipated woman, and shocked her proper relatives with outrageous fashions, makeup, smoking, and flings with high-ranking military men (we never had any military in the family). So, at some point in that distant past, a tattoo appeared on her cheek -- we're talking an era when only prison inmates wore them in the old country -- in a strategic spot where Mme De Pompadour, followed by silent movies stars et al, used to paint a fake mole that was a code for a playful intent. My grandmother's was small, perfectly round, and blue. She swore that she accidentally stabbed herself with a fountain pen and the ink got embedded and that was how she got it. No one believed her though she was adamant -- "it was an accident!" Well... I will never know. I never suspected that my grandmother could have been a woman of controversy in her youth, having come to know her much later in her life, but that's what her niece told me who was 7 when she last saw her until the family reunited 70 years later (the niece's side emigrated to the US 70 years earlier). The niece retained this image of a woman she wanted to be when she would grow up, all centered around that tattoo on her cheek, revolving around it in a never-fading memory. So... you never know. When I met the niece, she was, well, 77, an exquisite self-made American aristocracy piece, and she attributed much of what she had made herself into to that tattoo. Tao works in mysterious ways...

If you have a headache after taiji, it may mean that you've raised too much yang energy up to the head, this is common with beginners though not always headachy. My teacher, when he sees indications of too much yang stirred up after the practice, has us do Beating the Heavenly Drum to remove it. I've described it at some point -- maybe you'll find it so I don't have to repeat myself -- it's quick and efficient. This is followed (or preceded, whichever you prefer) by vigorous slapping of your whole body, beginning with bending as low as you can and slapping your ankles and calves, straightening out gradually and slapping away, the chest, sides, shoulders, back, arms, then bend down and repeat. You don't hit hard -- the goal is not to punish or hurt -- but you don't wuss out, make your slaps fairly decisive, as though you are swatting many annoying mosquitoes very rapidly. As for tattoos, some schools of taoism explicitly prohibit them, while others may not have voiced any particular opinions, but in general there's spiritual laws against self-mutilation in taoism that might apply. The belief is that you carve on your shen when you carve on your body, because taoism, unlike other modalities, does not view the body and the spirit as readily separable, they are both co-creators of the overall you, and the body is not understood as a chunk of inert matter animated by a spirit that influences it but is not influenced by it. In authentic taoism, what happens to your spirit is very much influenced by what you do with your body. So, consider whether you want to tattoo your shen -- you may wind up carrying the pattern into immortality and the immortals are rather old-fashioned (obviously), not as impressed by this or that current fad as most, for they've seen them all...

You got it. If one's left trouser pocket bulges because of a thick wad of cash tucked in there, or one's right one, it looks untidy and attracts attention. So one would want to distribute his money more evenly between his left and right pockets.

Thank you for your kind cooperation. I'm not going to nit-pick if the above statement is valuable to you... though it is still an ad hominem entry that we do try to make folks feel safe from being slammed with in liew of arguments. Generally, it's usually "obvious" that someone disagrees with what "we" hold dear but it's seldom obvious "why." I don't think Joeblast's mind is a "dollar sign wrapped in greed and profits." Seriously. All I know is that his research and cognitive process regarding this issue differ from yours. When we rush to demonize the opponent, we might miss something, don't you think? E.g., a valid point or two... a new fact we weren't aware of... and a golden opportunity to prevent our own minds from closing shut around whatever we've "decided."

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You can also apply cold (the point of an ice cube -- some acupoints are preferentially stimulated this way, in particular for toothaches), electrical stimulation, gold pellets with or without pressure, magnets, bleeding, cupping with bleeding, cupping without bleeding, gemstones, essential oils, burning with blistering, burning with scarring, micro-cutting of cross-linked tissues, percussive or vibratory stimulation, implants under the skin and acutattoos, external qigong with projection of qi into the points, voice stimulation (I saw it done once by a master who yelled at the patient's acupoints in a thunderous terrible voice), whispering, spellbinding, noncorporeal work on the acupoints of the shen body, light stimulation, color stimulation, biting, bee stinging (very efficient for rheumatism, arthritis, and a host of neuromuscular disorders), massage with saliva or urine or dot-application of same (e.g., a dot of your urine on the point between your eyebrows is a love spell), magical stimulation with sympathetic or symbolic transition of the points onto the talismanic writings, and on and on. So "there are three ways" should be followed by "most familiar to the Westerners and Western-style-schooled Asians."

There's several systems of acupressure I know a bit, and some are based on the acupuncture points but others are based on the "historic" acupuncture points -- like some aspects of the Korean Su Jok which appear very ancient and use both the later developments of acupuncture points and the earlier ones which are "the system of the human," "the system of the fish," and "the system of the insect." Besides, they use a technique (it is also present in Chinese acupuncture but not as a primary tool -- whereas in Su Jok it may be) of finding the individual points of much importance to this particular individual, which may or may not lie on the meridians. It is pretty amazing to witness (which I have). A practitioner may poke around the hand with a blunt pointed tool, then one finger, then the fingernail of this finger -- in increments of one-tenth of a millimeter -- until the patient suddenly yells in great pain, and sometimes faints! -- if such a point is located, the healing may be instant but they are hard to locate and require much patience and a kind of "second sight" that comes with practice. Then there's the modern "simplified" versions of acupressure, e.g. Ryodoraku, a Japanese-German-Russian system for using twelve points for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. These are typically used with electroacupressure and all the modern devices and thingies invented for the purpose, but also with the traditional tools. The devices can make it simple for someone who, e.g., can't diagnose from just touching, because they can be hooked up to a computer and the difference of electromagnetic potentials in these points can be translated into simple monkey see monkey do graphs.

To take this test, you would need to secure fifteen minutes to half an hour of quiet undisturbed time, like you do for meditation. When you're ready to start, you will read the question, close your eyes, visualize what you're asked to visualize, answer the question mentally, and then scroll down to the next one. Don't type your answers right away, the visualization must not be interrupted. When you are done with the whole test (it's not long), then you write down everything you saw (or felt or imagined or conceptualized or otherwise perceived -- visualization skills vary, so you would use any mode of perception that comes naturally to retrieve the images you are asked to retrieve.) There's no "right" or "wrong" answers to this test. The interpretation will be posted when everybody who wants to give it a try has done so. (Any new takers who might show up later will be asked not to look at it prior to taking the test. ) Ready?.. Let's begin. Close your eyes, sit quietly for a minute, breathe naturally. Visualize a forest. Visualize a path you're walking that leads you into the forest. You are walking on a path in the forest... Keep walking... You keep walking and you come across a cup in your path. What kind of a cup is it? Describe the cup, describe your feelings, describe your actions. Keep walking... You keep walking and you come across a key in your path. What kind of a key is it? Describe the key, describe your feelings, describe your actions. Keep walking... You keep walking and you come across a lake in your path. What kind of a lake is it? Describe the lake, describe your feelings, describe your actions. Keep walking... You keep walking and you come across a house in your path. What kind of a house is it? Describe the house, describe your feelings, describe your actions. Keep walking... You keep walking and you come across a wall in your path. The wall is completely impenetrable, there's no openings. There's no way to walk around it because it is too long, there's no way to climb over it because it is too high. What kind of a wall is it? Describe the wall, describe your feelings, describe your actions. The test ends here. Please write down everything you have experienced.

I would take it further and say I'm an intellectual because of the boobs. I distinctly remember that before I had them, I wasn't one. Post hoc sed non propter hoc might apply though, as an intellectual with or without boobs but with some formal logic schooling might argue. To return to Laozi's et al existence proof: I think I mentioned a friend of a friend who collects information about Burned Libraries. You all heard about the Great Library at Alexandria whose burning put an end to all the information of all the wisdom of ages accumulated therein; a much older and bigger one (forget its name) existed in China and was likewise put to the torch; but then big ones, smaller ones, great and rare and noteworthy private collections, etc., were also being burned from time to time all the time for a couple thousand years, and that's what this friend of a friend has to show: ashes where information used to be. His current collection lists about 100,000 Burned Libraries and is growing as his research goes further. That's your proof IMO of any and all instances of the "absence of proof" regarding historic figures proving nothing. The same is true for the "presence of proof," because burned libraries were substituted by libraries containing proof of whatever the burning party wanted proved, nothing else. I've heard compelling proof that Shakespeare didn't exist, that "Shakespeare" was the name chosen for a corporation manufacturing "Shakespeare's works" and that as many as six authors at one time worked on some of the plays it produced. I've heard compelling proof that "Mozart" is the same deal. And many others. They did exist, it's just that they didn't do what the corporation says they did, it was about focusing the idea of creativity on a brand name chosen for the purpose, because that's the best way to sell. I've heard Alexander Dumas wrote about 1 in 10 books ascribed to him. I've heard Stephen King is a similar corporation. Laozi, on the other hand... who knows. I've read the best of Laozi's ideas in the Yuandao that predates him. Whether he was regurgitating earlier sources, didn't exist at all, or existed (as some assert) in the form of an entity free of the constraints of time and going back and forth as the spirit moved him, I don't know. Someone existed who wanted to say what Laozi said. To understand the message is to understand who. And I have my suspicions... and so did Confucius (who existed, was long-lived, married, and picky about his food to the extent that his wife went down in history as one of the first Chinese women to divorce a husband, in an era when it was almost unthinkable, because there was no pleasing him no matter what she cooked) who believed Laozi existed because he met him, but didn't think Laozi was a man.

You are most welcome. No, using the same visualization to change things would not be efficient. The immediate symbols obtained refer to the underlying reality -- what is, as is. If you don't change the reality, but change the symbols, all you get is a mismatch, a further disconnection from reality. If you work on strengthening these "new and improved" symbols, again without changing the underlying reality, you will have created something in your mind that cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio refers to as "as-if loops" -- ideas that have the power to generate superficial feelings which begin and end in the upper cortical regions, in a loop that starts and ends in the brain, without involving the body. The archetypes are not like that. Archetypal symbols that are presented to the brain do not start in the brain, they start in the experiences lived through, in the body, and report to the brain directly, not symbolically; it is the job of the "thinking" mind then, upon getting such a report, to interpret and objectify it, to come up with something it can condense in to a symbol to represent THAT reality. If you choose a different symbol, "editing the report," so to speak, the body will get no information about the change, since it didn't live it and didn't participate in the modification. So, you may be thinking something that you like more, but deep systemic functioning will not be affected except adversely (for if the mind rejects the accurate reports in favor of "as-if" ones, communication between you and you is further disrupted.) This is not to say that the test does not serve a very useful pragmatic purpose, because one can be pointed in the general direction of areas in need of work, and this work, which needs to be comprehensive rather than superficial for anyone who would take such things to heart, can indeed change the archetypal symbol itself -- this is possible if you change YOU, to the extent that the very primal imprint gets deleted and a new one installed. This is not easy or fast or straightforward, but the test can hint at the venues to explore... E.g., there's so many uninhabited houses out there! People come to the house and then don't come in. Or they feel someone lives there, even have a distinct specific sense of who this "someone" is, but don't realize THEY live there, don't know what's inside the house... it remains terra incognita, and they move on without even trying to knock on the door, much less pay a visit, much less come HOME. So, if this happens, this may hint that someone in this situation knows himself or herself only very superficially... stays well away from one's deep inner world... does not live in one's body... and so on, in every case it will be a bit different, but it is noteworthy that many indigenous people, when asked to visualize a house, simply visualize "MY" house -- "I live here, so I come in and there's this and that and I do this and that here..." And so on. Every answer anyone gave to every question is for them to ponder, the goal of this test is to gain a little self-awareness and a bit of "know thyself" -- it is not prescriptive... it merely illuminates, what to do with what has been illuminated is, well, what do you do with awareness in general? -- It's the germ of any change anyone desires... or of remaining unchanged if what you've become aware of suits you.

Being constantly sober is not the state of consciousness expected of a person in many cultures. (Mongolians believed for the longest time that it is somewhat shameful for a grown man to be completely sober. "Plain vanilla" consciousness was seen as unmanly.) While I've seen it overdone to a ridiculous extent in Russia, I can understand that drunken consciousness is a choice one might make, well, consciously. Even in the most unlikely places... The most unlikely place where I've encountered it was a buddhist temple in Beijing where my local friend took me to a miracle-working massage therapist. The therapist showed up almost an hour late, and by that time his other patients arrived, and he decided to treat them first, because it was just a quickie, and then concentrate on the "white ghosts." He started working with one of the women and then he started yelling at her at the top of his lungs. At some point he pushed her away and ran out into the yard where I was waiting, screaming something to me, then ran back in. "What did he say?" I asked my friend. "He said, 'If you came to this country to witness barbarism, come look! This is it! This is what true barbarism looks like!' " I asked, "what does he mean -- the fact that he is drunk?" "No, that has nothing to do with anything, he's always drunk after lunch. He's talking about his patient. She didn't do what he told her to do the last time she visited. And now her skeletal structure is off all over again and that's what he calls barbarism." When my turn came, I experienced something indescribable. I've never had bodywork of this kind -- I felt like a kid of twelve after he was done, body and mind alike. But while he was working on me, he poured buckets of drunken abuse on my head which my friend translated only partially. Would I go to this guy again? Only every day if I could.

INTERPRETATION The test is based on archetypes discovered by Karl Jung in the course of his inquiry into mythologies, legends, art, dreams, symbols and patterns of many cultures around the world. What he discovered was that, notwithstanding vast differences in human societies, both cultural and temporal (from the most ancient times to modern), certain images persist across the spectrum, are present everywhere, and mean the same things to the deeper consciousness of all humans. Their symbolic significance is rooted in the fact that there's some biological reality underlying such symbols, they are not arbitrary, they are developmental. The ability to create abstract symbolic representations of the actual biological experiences is something all humans have in common, and Jung discovered that the most primal of these experiences are represented by identical symbols in all environments. The test offered presents these fundamental archetypes. Here's their universal meaning: A PATH IN THE FOREST is the universal symbol for the path of life. The reason is that for the longest time in our history (over 99,999% of our species' overall time on this planet), this was actually true. The planet used to be all covered with forests, and that's where human lives unfolded. Most of the forests are gone now but the image persists, it is ingrained very deeply due to countless millennia of repeating the pattern -- "life" is what takes place as we "walk through the forest." ("They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" -- Bob Dylan... but don't let me digress.) The CUP stands for love and signifies your attitude, experience, feelings both conscious and unconscious toward love. The biological-psychological reason for such symbolization is that we are mammals. The first experience of love is that of nursing, being offered the drink of life and love by the mother, out of a vehicle after whose shape humans modeled all "cups," containers for liquid sustenance. The context in which we were first given it when entering this life is imprinted as our perception of love and its manifestations on a most fundamental level. The first, most intimate "cup" a baby drinks from creates (or compromises) the primal closeness that patterns all subsequent experiences associated with love on this one. The KEY stands for personal wealth, attitude toward material possessions, money, tangible valuables, belongings, ownership. The reason is that keys, regardless of their shape and form, is something invented to separate "mine" from "not mine," to be able to take a portion of whatever "doesn't belong to anyone" or "belongs to everyone" and say, with actions rather than with words, "THIS belongs to ME," by locking this portion away from everybody else with a key. The idea of "ownership" has to do with the imprint of individuation. It is neither my place nor my desire to say if it's good or bad to have a strong "I me my" individuality, this is for a different discussion. But that's what your key means. The LAKE stands for sex, and also for reproduction which is the primary biological function of sex. The reason is that your first experience of maximum closeness, total immersion, with reproductive overtones to it, is that of being a fetus in the womb and swimming in the amniotic fluid. Again, this experience will color your sexual manifestations, attitudes, feelings, abilities, etc., depending on a very -- I should say the most -- fundamental experience of your life. Those who had creatures swimming in their lake might consider that they brought into the picture some additional archetypes (fishes, e.g., share a Jungian archetype with a taoist symbol for "fertility," perhaps hinting at one's deep parental drives underneath the sex drive.) The HOUSE stands for self. This is self-explanatory, and universal. (Interestingly, someone who took the test who is a twin was the only one who came up with a two-story house. That's because "self" as "house" you inhabit is also a primal fundamental of perceptions since before birth.) The WALL stands for death. This is a concept which is difficult for the living consciousness to integrate, I should perhaps say "impossible" rather than "difficult," because the "path in the forest" is all a living consciousness knows, and when it ends... well, beliefs and speculations and dogmas and wishful (or fearful) thinking take the place of the actual experience. Everything else is experience, but the Wall, only for some. (There's people who have experienced death -- most often during a difficult birth when they had to be revived or somehow got revived in the process, or a drugged birth when they shut down to near-death -- and some who have experienced a clinical death later in life, but for everybody else, death in this-here life is not a systemic memory.) So the prerequisites of the Wall of the test (something final, impenetrable, no climbing over, no walking around) are often ignored, and people come up with images suggesting that the wall is not really there, is no big deal, and so on. I would suggest that everyone whose "wall" seemed too easy to ignore or overcome repeat the steps and try to visualize the wall really archetypal as offered in the test ... see what might happen if you erect it to these specs.