Taomeow

Prove it, pretzel boy. I have some of the best teachers and one of the best minds available in this century. (Don't expect me to blush, I know what I have.) If you have something better, I'm interested in what you have. What do you have?

Ever wondered why so many taoist immortality practices are about conceiving the "immortal fetus" and then "giving birth" to it? But first of course a man tries to create a lower dantien to store stuff in. A spiritual uterus, effectively. To be immortal, one has to embody tao. Tao is the Great Mother, according to the immortals' accounts. So whoever wants to be an immortal, has to embody the Great Mother -- regardless of one's gender incidental to the current condition. I've seen articles asserting, on the basis of vast research into taoist classics, that Laozi not only became a Mother, but managed to give birth to himself! Which only confirms the shamanic/Goddess cult roots of taoism -- the Goddess maintaining immortality by giving birth to herself was part of the universal beliefs for at least 75,000 years (which is the dating of the oldest figurine of the Goddess giving birth to herself found in Europe, if memory serves). I think in order to get anywhere near genuine immortality practices, one would have to completely disregard the ideas and concepts of the last couple of thousand years. (You know, all those disembodied spirits ascending to heaven, paradise, nirvana, all that Indo-European jazz...)

No, I think it speaks to the spirit of woman. The spirit of man is about "right now," yang is fast and immediate and reactive to the imperatives of the moment. Yang is impulsive -- it does not delay action into the indefinite future and does not dwell on the remote past, it lives in the present. The spirit of woman is about "forever," yin is invested into the past and the future (you can't have jing without the past, jing is memory, and you can't have pregnancy if you are not embodying the future. Yin has to have patience, you can't have a baby "right now," nor immortality -- you have to embody the spirit of long-term goals.)

Yeah, but then one is in danger of discovering that "refining qi to shen" is like "refining a forest to a shopping mall." Many a noodle would be fried!

The Pill. Except you can't have a doctor prescribe it, you have to make it yourself.

Thanks for the clarification.

Well, given that yang naturally goes up and yin, down, yang stays higher in the body at all times (except in some alchemical practices where you reverse the flow) and does not run out of the legs into the earth, this direction being quite un-yang-ly. Yin runs down to the earth while yang runs up to heaven. There's much confusion about which position and practice does what because of all the doctrines giving yang a preferential treatment. Like, if it's good, it's gotta be yang. Whereas what you may be preventing from running out and into the ground when you sit is, of course, yin. Yin, however, does not dissipate as readily as yang does (that's why your body is not as flaky and restless as your mind -- I mean the generic "you" of course -- and does not change its shape as whimsically as your thoughts do). The process whereby you lose yin is yin-to-yang upward transformations underlying jing to qi to shen transformations. This is the business-as-usual process for anyone with an overblown neocortex and stunted body-mind communication. You want to reverse that in the systems of taoism I favor, and encourage it in other systems. Yes. You sit (yin) in a primordial Xiantian position (yin) and, typically, do not encourage the random dissipation (yang activity) of your mind (yang) and that's the start. Yes, that's exactly right. The FL is the most simple. It's just that we the "civilized" folks are distorted into all kinds of complications that complicate it. My daughter, e.g., could sit in a perfect lotus as a toddler and liked to swing from a bar and make a full lotus in the air when she was five or six. She couldn't do it anymore by middle school.

Since it's the position of the fetus in the womb, it is naturally designed not to block energy anywhere -- a quick look at the meridians chart would confirm this too. What blocks energy is muscle tensions, chronically contracted fascia, and misaligned skeletal structures. Full lotus done correctly goes a long way toward correcting these, straightening out the spine and improving the flow of communication between the upper and lower parts of the body and between the body and the brain. What one might perceive as discomfort is actually "input" of perceptions that was not available before due to this communication being chronically disrupted. I was told by a master of great attainment that meditation begins where comfort ends, and cultivation begins where pain starts. (Not the pain of a physiologically unsound position, of course, not the pain of damaging your body... the pain similar to that which you feel when your toes have been frozen numb and start thawing out when you get out of the cold and warmth begins to restore circulation. Having grown up in a notoriously cold country, I've often experienced this as a child...) "Comfortable" is what you want to be at all other times, outside your meditation time, and meditation is your tool toward this goal. But a "comfortable meditation" is an oxymoron. Then again, it is very common in the West to say "meditation" when really meaning "relaxation."

I think that's exactly what it is. Ours is the first culture on earth afraid of aging -- and for a damn good reason. Old people were honored and treated with great respect in all others -- "older" was indeed quite naturally associated with "wiser," and people welcomed rather than feared growing old, because that which lay ahead with old age was an attractive rather than an atrocious social proposition. There's a Chinese prayer that goes something like, "gods, let me see my hair turn white, let me see my teeth turn yellow and fall out, let me see my face crease with living, let me exchange my youthful vigor for the wisdom of old age." "Botox" is "botulinum toxin," something that forms in canned (dead but preserved intact in this state) products. It's interesting that consumer demand for eternal youth is met with the industry's eager offer of mummification.

Oh, I agree, consciousness overcomes much -- taken to its full potential, perhaps all -- but consciousness has to be there, and stuff that is "heavy" and hard to accept into consciousness is hidden from it the deepest. I think that, with the exception of extreme cases ("extremely abnormal" or "completely natural and normal" of which the first one is far more common than the second one), it's often impossible to tell who was deprived more than the next guy/gal, the external "markers" are not all that reliable. I do believe we as a society, culture, civilization have ALL been deprived of normal development -- to varying extents, from fairly "standard" to incompatible with survival (like abandoned babies who are not held at all and not shown any love -- orphanages personnel know by now that they die, even if they are fed adequately, they can't survive zero human closeness -- and those who are "handled" briefly do survive but their brains in adulthood weigh 2/3 of the brains of those who had more contact... and those who had full contact, in indigenous tribes still practicing it, provided there's no malnutrition offered in the same helping by OUR civilization taking charge of theirs, are at the level of our 4-year-olds developmentally at the age of nine months!) So I think it's both personal and universal, ontogenic and philogenic, and can ultimately be solved only on both levels... Some people make the mistake of "I'm OK, it's you who's in trouble" -- they can never be OK, just defensively equipped to turn consciousness down. We are all in trouble. Realizing that makes it both easier and harder to own up to "I am in trouble." But without such "ownership" there's no normalizing. The body, the mind, and the spirit all have to know they have been wounded in order to begin to heal.

Oh, they are indeed saying what they mean, but it's something very funky if you look deeper into it... The Five Tastes associated with the wuxing phases ("spirits" in their own right) of the Five Organs -- Salty (Kidneys), Sour (Liver), Bitter (Heart), Sweet (Spleen-Stomach) and Pungent (Lungs) -- are, as usual, all good in their right balanced proportions and not so healthy if deficient or excessive. Henry C. Lu (a translator of The Yellow Emperor's Classic and author of some of my favorite books on nutrition from TCM perspective) in his "Chinese Natural Cures" asserts that standard Western diets as we know them today massively undernourish the Heart -- we almost eat nothing bitter, unlike all traditional cultures -- while massively overnourishing the Stomach-Spleen -- with sweet stuff eaten in humongous excess. He further explains how exactly this throws everything else off balance healthwise, while I have my own thoughts in this respect in relation to love and the spirit of love. The real taste of sexual attraction and the spirit of jing is Salty -- not excessively salty like commercial products, but precise-balance Salty like blood, tears, amniotic fluid, semen, the Kidney Yin/Kidney Yang fluids. The salt content of the amniotic fluid and tears is exactly the same as that of the ocean. This is the taste of primordial Xiantian love, we all come from the ocean, life on earth comes from the Water phase, from the Kidney qi, which is the first "translation" of jing into materiality. This taste is of primal, natural, all-encompassing love that is experienced by a fetus in the womb swimming in it, swallowing it, having it washed in with nourishment and growth and life with every heartbeat of the mother -- and this is the only "unconditional" love there is -- for any "conditions" imposed on it would terminate life. "Unconditional love" is an immersion, and its taste is salty. Now the funky part. The Sweet taste is the taste of infancy. The mother's milk is sweet. Western civilization has destroyed the real close intimate relationship between the mother and the infant. Failure to breastfeed, failure to do it for an adequate period even if it does happen, failure to do it in a 'free access' fashion of natural humans and substituting schedules instead, failure to carry the baby on the mother's body (which satisfies the real, not Freudian-tales-derived, need for physical closeness in an infant which is not "sexual" except in the sick imaginations of sick deranged "authorities" but natural -- you develop your multiple senses, including the sense of competence in space, gravity, weight distribution, etc., from being carried like that -- continuously for the first year or two and on and off for up to four years in all natural cultures -- and in other species of primates, if the little one is deprived of it he or she grows up with impaired social behaviors, both males and females become either oversexed or afraid of sex, many become aggressive and abusive, and females are uniformly not interested in their motherly functions and abandon their infants.) So the funky part is, associating "sweet" with love and intimacy means sexualizing infantile drives, i.e. members of our culture, frustrated at the phase of infantile development due to a lack of "sweetness" they were supposed to get from the mother at this stage, with milk and "sweet baby love," never grow out of this stage. The law of psychological development is ironclad -- any normal developmental stage that didn't happen at the allocated time will keep trying to happen, in a distorted-any-which-way fashion because its timing is now forever wrong, and consequently all its manifestations. No one can move on to the next stage who is busy re-representing the one that has been stunted -- in all new situations, that's what will try to unfold, while stunting the "next" developmental stage and the next after it. All of them. No human development of "full potential." No "fully human" humans. And all because no "fully human human infancy" has taken place. So "sweet" love is a symptom of a major MAJOR major problem we as a society are having with love... Most people are emotionally stuck in infancy -- forever. The whole "baby," "honey," etc., hoopla is about "I couldn't get sweet love as a baby, so now I will lump it together with adult love and sexualize my baby needs for closeness and intimacy and try to get it this way." So, no real sex in this culture for most of its members. Only neurotic re-representations of frustrated early developmental needs onto the next developmental stage.

I think food references are used instead -- looks like words of love are all about a sugar rush. Sweetie, sugar, honey, for racial diversity brown sugar, chocolate, for an all-American set of values Miss American Pie, for complex carbs -- pumpkin... The Chinese keep the spirit references close to the organs of residence of the five shens! It's not uncommon to hear "you are my heart and my liver" from a lover where we would only mention the heart, and I was just reading a Chinese novel where a protagonist who had tragically lost her family cries, "Oh my heart, oh my liver, oh my spleen, why have you abandoned me?"

So the dot you left did serve a purpose... you made a . point! I just learned it myself the other day, and found fascinating parallels with taoist thought... Yielbongura is their way to say "the natural includes the supernatural," except there's no concept of "supernatural" there, just the idea that there's things that, should you attempt to sink the tooth of "describable" knowledge into them, would break it. "That which knowledge can't eat."

That would be what the Dagara of West Africa call Yielbongura, "the thing that knowledge can't eat."

Good questions, realfastcat! "Martially" does not mean "externally." Taiji is an internal martial art, every word key word. Some teachers use it externally, whether martially or not, this is how it is taught to beginners even by a good teacher. But then a good teacher proceeds to teach it internally AND martially. If you separate the two, you get neither. "Martially" starts with ways to combat your own internal enemies -- habitual poor alignments and the resulting impaired flow of qi, low or erratic energy, unhealthy responses to stress (internal first and foremost, then external), and so on. The skill is hard to acquire if you go "internal" right away, you have to actually "externalize" the opponent to better get it -- hence the unbreakable unity of martial-internal aspects of real taiji taught by real teachers. No. It becomes a nice moving relaxation routine. Useful, enjoyable, but not profound. Again, the assumption that anything "spiritual" is possible if you don't "fight" is based on wishful thinking, on the belief that you have no "internal adversaries." If you go for any which routine with this assumption, which is a defensive illusion, you gain defensive illusory spirituality. Alas, all too common. Absolutely. It's just that you don't want to use an electronic microscope for a mattress, or a pressure cooker for a bicycle. It's more like your own life -- it can be used "for various purposes" but you wouldn't use it as "infancy" when you're 30 or as "menstruation" when you're male. You determine the purposes to use taijiquan for based on what it really is. It is an internal martial art. Take it from there and use it for any purpose an internal martial art can be used for. The sky's the limit, long as you use it as what it is, and don't use it as what it isn't. The rest for someone else or maybe later, gotta run...

I was raised by atheists of the fierce kind. So when I started discovering patterns and flows and directional interactions and cycles and phases of change, I termed them "energies of the world" and started drawing diagrams and wracking my brains over what it was that I was trying to express -- with math and geometry and physics and nameless frustration. I joined a forum titled Physics New Ideas. I kept asking questions. I remember one of them -- "can a field exist that is somehow localized in certain areas of the planet, that would cause living in these areas to influence human behavior in persistent patterns throughout centuries, causing whole populations, e.g., to wage incessant wars in the locations where the field is induced, regardless of what peoples populate the area at this particular time and with no clear cause-effect explanation for wars waged there and not elsewhere?" (Unbeknownst to me, I had discovered sha' chi in the historic process, so I wanted to figure out if it qualified as a "field." A "field" is what "science" calls phenomena that you can't observe any other way but via their effects on objects and events, so I wanted a "reputable" explanation, a "field theory" for what I was observing.) Physicists told me a few tales, but mostly couldn't really help because in their learned wisdom they were observing what they were told to observe but not what they weren't told to observe in conjunction with their studies and theories and practices -- to wit, the world, history, time, and their own bodies. So, no field theory for me there, so I started creating one. Then I chanced upon some book on feng shui and found out about taoism and qi. The rest is history. I still like my original term -- "energies of the world." Qi is not energy, but "energies of the world" are comprised of the interactions derived from the "potential energy" of Hetu and "actualized energy" of Luoshu reverberating throughout the manifest world as yin-yang, qi, wuxing, bagua, ganying, and together they do qualify to be called that. So, when I realized that what I discovered independently has already been discovered, thousands of years ago, and had been worked with for centuries by those in the know, who happened to constitute a whole ancient civilization, I was happy beyond belief. So I threw away the wobbly wheels I was trying to reinvent and mounted the old but never-rusty, supremely well-oiled and unbroken bicycle of taoism, and took a ride on the Way. And saw that it was good.

Nice contributions, guys/gals! Very true. To this I would add that experiencing the whole of one's spirit -- one's ren, "humanness" -- encompasses deep and undistorted (not repressed and not chopped-up and not rationalized away and not stuck-in-a-rut and not stale and not forgotten) feelings, which are more than "emotions" and include sensations from the body, accurate perceptions of the outer environment, accurate perception of the interactions between the inner and outer environment, and many senses in addition to the "five" -- e.g. a sense of time, a sense of "propriety" of this or that choice of behavior at this time, territorial sense (home or not home, a place comfortable to be in or to be improved on or to get the hell out of, etc.), a sense of being or not being accepted and loved, a sense of the weather, a sense of nature, an understanding of other creatures (very important) and objects and events (some people know if the shoes on their own feet are too tight and that's where it ends, others know if the country is "too tight" and that's where it begins -- one could say that the first one has a "trapped" spirit that feels "trapped," and the second one, an "expanded" one which feels "trapped"), and on and on... The mind too -- the intellect too -- thinking is a form of feeling, which many don't know because of the overall spirit being in a chopped-up fragmented state. (The unification of thinking and feeling is a noble spiritual goal...) As many other things taoism defines best via what they are not, the human spirit is not a state of bu ren -- "numbing out of one's humanness."

My brother-in-law is not a taoist, not "spiritual" at all in any recognized shape or form, has never practiced anything if you don't count tennis, but I sometimes think he is a reincarnation of Farmer Fukuoka or some such. (He can sit in full lotus naturally, e.g., without a day of training in his life, just because it is a comfortable pose for him.) His favorite motto: "Trouble trouble as soon as it troubles you, but not sooner." He does nothing about anything until pushed. If pushed, he never resists. I don't know if it has anything to do with the question, but he popped in my mind as soon as I read it.

None of this exists, said the spider to the fly, the wolf to the sheep.

Awareness explodes spilled tea would hit the cat but he jumps back in time

Yeah, I've been wondering.

Good question. You don't need the cosmological side of it from day one, and won't need it for at least the first few years, but you do need a teacher who has it, otherwise the patterns of motion and alignments you will get from him or her will be off from the start, and they are pretty difficult to correct once the wrong ones are ingrained. How to find a teacher who has it -- well, that's where the traditional way of finding teachers shines. Lineage, what else. Who your teacher learned from, for how long, how intensely, and who the teacher's teacher was, and so on, pretty much does it. If you get any which party line instead -- that it doesn't matter, that it is to massage someone's ego and serves no other purpose, that it is overruled by a good heart or a good set of videos, etc. etc., all those endless arguments against lineage studies that you hear these days -- run! Run away from this party line and keep running for as long as it takes to find a teacher who is not proclaiming it, and then ask him or her for lineage credentials. It's that simple. We live in a golden age of taiji -- great masters have come to us, the ones we used to have no way to learn from. Would be a shame if we collectively blew it.

You can start with the Songs of Taiji. I can't presume to know what you do and don't know of the taoist principles incorporated in taijiquan. If you have any specific questions, I'll be happy to help, to the best of my modest ability. Sample questions: what is "opening and closing," "manifest and unmanifest," "hetu and luoshu," "xiantian and houtian," yin-yang, wuxing, bagua, ganying, jing-qi-shen, yi, zhi, and then you can start getting into peng, an, lu and the rest of them... As for secrets from my masters -- here's one I'm free to share: no master has ever shared a secret with anyone who hasn't grasped the fundamentals. As for the demo, I can only assert the obvious: the men practicing in the video are 21st century Asians; 21st century Asians are known to practice many nontraditional arts that are not derived from taoism or China; not to say that this is not traditional -- Mantak Chia, e.g., has a similar routine for women, and I've a hunch women can lift WAY more than men should they train in this particular sport, given the advantages of their anatomy and the powerful muscles there (try birthing a child and you'll know what I'm talking about... oops... you're a guy, right? So then... well, whatever ); and I have no idea what you believe the video you posted has to do with taijiquan, but if you're willing to share, please go ahead.