Taomeow

You are consistently generous and kind to me, Zerostao, thank you. And I like your contributions very much too. Taiji of taijiquan the mind? That's quite an idea! Which mind? Surely the one in the head has its say in it, that's where "verbal" and "conceptual" taoist principles are stored... I'm nowhere near running it on autopilot, but I suspect high-level masters store this "taiji mind" everywhere... and even nowhere! I've had brief glimpses... There's this high level guy who says, "don't cultivate qi, don't cultivate yi, cultivate emptiness." I think he stores his mind in the wuji.

The problem with dismissing legends and myths is that this dismissal is a myth in itself, the currently propagated Great Myth of Skepticism. What is and isn't true within its framework is a matter of blind faith in its own right. Few people have investigated it for its validity, they simply accept the prevalent stance, the one currently supported. Who and how and why made them assume this stance, they don't know. It's the myth of the century and it assaults them from every venue and so they wind up embracing it without knowing what it really is they have embraced. For countless centuries that went before, the stance was different. It was universally accepted that humans are capable of retaining historic information via oral transmissions and are not all that creative and imaginative in making self-consistent things up. People believed that they are more likely to remember and re-tell stories of real events, real people and real places they were told by those who have been there than to create plots and scenarios and spin tales -- not everybody is born a script writer, but everybody is born an oral transmitter... and in a culture that valued this skill above all else, as did every pre-literal culture on earth, it was unlikely that it would be treated sloppily and irresponsibly. Hundreds of thousands of libraries were burned, but oral transmissions survived those fires. Floods and earthquakes and wars demolished civilizations with their records and artifacts but oral transmissions survived those floods and earthquakes and wars. So if a "legend" or a "myth" persevered, it was generally accepted as more reliable a source than any new bureacratic or religious or political edict promulgating from above the acceptance or denial of this or that opinion as true or false. So, um, I believe myths and legends to a much greater extent than the latest and the greatest skeptical denials, simply because the latter are a johnny-come-lately of information and knowledge acquisition, easy come, easy go, while the former is how we ever learned anything at all about anything throughout our history. So Zhang Sanfeng is real to me, my Chen lineage which they trace to him is real to me to the same extent as the art of its transmitters, and to take a stance that places me above their understanding in a skeptical foray of know-it-all superior authority would be not only disrespectful, it would be idiotic. Prove what you preach with your life, I tell the carrier of the Skepticism Myth. The carriers of the Zhang Sanfeng myth do. Do their detractors? Yeah right. They are the greatest masters of the taiji of the mouth. The day one of them kicks one of the Four Tigers' ass with that skeptically trained tongue is the day I will start paying attention to its supreme ultimate flappings. Until then, I remain supremely skeptical of the skeptics.

I'm told by people in the know that those who apply the principles and methods of taoism to taijiquan become very good at it, and of these, some become exceptional, great masters. I'm also told that those who don't incorporate these principles and methods in their practice remain mediocre no matter how long they practice. This makes much sense to me, because not understanding that taijiquan is an internal art of taoist cultivation turns it into a sport, and sports are decisively not taoist and even not Chinese (was just reading a Chinese novel set in the 19th century where some aristocratic youths were sent to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale to learn the Western ways, and upon their first exposure, liked and embraced some, were puzzled and disturbed by others, and were put off by sports more than anything else, never understanding the purpose or such a useless waste of energy.) Now then. If you are taught taijiquan properly, as a taoist internal cultivation art, you will be looking taoism straight in the face no matter where you turn. Taoism is not a "belief system," taoism is a system of embodying and living what you believe. Taijiquan is one of the methods to accomplish that. The art is a form-and-function manifestation of the most abstract and subtle taoist principles and notions. It embraces taoist cosmology (you can't do, e.g., Fair Lady at the Shuttles at a "supreme ultimate" level if you don't know that it is a "translation" of taoist creation/cosmology myths into the language of smaller-scale imitation, into the -- taoist again -- language of ganying). It embraces feng shui and wuxing. It teaches you to embody Luoshu and the eight trigrams and the four stages of the cosmic process. You can never do Six Seals and Four Closings the "supreme ultimate" way if you never get that. It starts teaching your body to understand the rhythm and pace of Changes -- you can't peng and fajin if you don't get that, you can only imitate it with li, and a real master will have a hearty laugh watching you (and destroy you in a real confrontation, should that ever occur.) And so on. Taijiquan teaches the principles of taoism that cannot be taught with words. It is exactly what Laozi means in his often quoted, seldom understood first line. Tao can't be told, but it can be done. Taijiquan is the how-to method of doing it. That's why it is very detrimental to the acquisition of the art to make no distinction between a comic book and a Picasso. If you learn taiji as a non-taoist art, you're paying the price of a Picasso for a comic book, not in money but in energy wasted on acquiring a mediocre skill that will never transcend its mediocrity no matter how much time and dedication you throw its way.

And so on. Since you're an expert on the kind of world I live in, I may not need to inform you, but just in case you were momentarily distracted and not monitoring my world of fear at this particular moment: in this world, you are the first-ever taobum to make it to my Ignore list. Congratulations!

In class, my teacher's instructions sound as though they are coming straight from the mouth of tao: "Open... close... Up... down... Heavy... light... Slow down... speed up... Hold... release... Coil inward... uncoil outward... Drop down... reach up... Spin... return... Intercept... redirect... Protect... attack... Hide... show... and here you can turn around and leave -- or step in and finish him off, your choice..."

The taoist tradition attributes most cases of possession to astral projection by amateurs, whether purposeful or accidental. While the spirit goes a-roaming, the body is left unattended, and can easily get invaded. On the other hand, a traditionally untrained projector risks losing parts of the spirit if he or she does not know how to safely return them home -- and upon waking up is diminished in spirit without knowing it. This practice is considered to be extremely dangerous and in the traditional setting is never undertaken without multiple layers of protection -- you learn to draw talismans, use a spirit gourd, employ stone warriors, assume the form of a ghost- and demon-fighting deity, make a pact with the tiger spirit, recite scriptures, and so on -- and when all of the protective measures are in place, you take baby steps, e.g. learn to astral project to the four corners of your bedroom and practice control of your motions and whereabouts before venturing farther and farther away from home. I have reasons to believe that astral projection is considerably riskier to one's health than vegetalista curandero practices. I've met so many really "weird" types among the "spiritual" dabblers... deficient in this or that spirit, Heart Shen unaccounted for, Yi missing, and some strange obsessions have come to take their place... I believe some exhibit classic signs of possession -- e.g. people who eat only raw foods (ghosts can't consume the essence of cooked foods), or... but you probably know what kind of "weirdness cum spirituality" I'm talking about, right?..

And here's what a healthy Po looks like at the age of 117:

Yeah, if someone is looking for a "holy man," the place to go is elsewhere -- a church, an ashram, a lunatic asylum... A shaman is a force of nature, and to judge a shaman is to judge a force of nature. Where would one climb to position oneself higher than a force of nature that creates and destroys, heals and kills, deceives with mimicry and false tracks, hides behind so many veils, and tells the truth only to those who go all the way to find out? Only to those who realize the whole of their true nature, not a half-assed "nice try"? You can't tell from a three-week-old embryo whether it's a frog or a prince. You have to go all the way to find out. Shamans do. Fakes don't. Fakes are reprehensible, real shamans are beyond judgement, they don't respond to the demands of the most popular morality of the moment, they respond to the demands of the morality of eternity. Too huge a subject for a forum post, as usual...

Yeah, my point exactly. Your friends aren't living there getting trained for over a decade so as to "experience something," do they? I mean, you wouldn't maintain friendships with people this superficial, would you? I believe you were describing your experience, and I believe it has pretty much nothing in common with mine, not because of a (to quote Cat) "false sense of specialness" of "me" but because of a true sense of specialness of the experience in comparison to many other "experiences of me" I've had, including, um, but not limited to, "spiritual" ones. I think I've said it many times in various shapes and forms and will say it again: whoever places themselves and their ways above shamanism and its ways has had the Way taken away from them. By force, by deceit, by hook or by crook. Authentic shamanic ways are not to be condescended to from ANY platform. Word.

Seth, you didn't do it with a real shaman, did you?.. I'm sure you are right about "some" people being impressed due to getting to experience "something" -- but I've experienced pretty much everything before ayahuasca (have you tried giving a natural birth to twins, e.g.? or major surgery with near-death out-of-body adventures? or visits by a spiritual teacher in your dreams who explains taoism to you before you find out it exists it in the waking world? to name a few?) My life has never been about "not enough experiencing," has always been about "too much." And still real ayahuasca (there's different grades of the brew, some are about as potent as two aspirin, and all of the non-shamanically non-traditionally obtained ones are along these lines), in a real shamanic context, with the real deep jungle involved in the experience (95% of all fauna and flora species on Earth reside there -- have you experienced that?) and with a real quest for motivation (not curiosity, not just something different to do, but a quest, a fire in the belly sending you there) -- that's an experience you can't possibly compare to any other if She chooses to open you up. (And She is picky as to who She will initiate and who She will dismiss... some people can take all the right steps and still not get anywhere no matter how many times they try. I've seen it.) How is a doctrine (like, e.g., buddhism) more natural than a plant in the rain forest?

Am I psychic or am I chopped liver. I saw this coming from you. Are you an expert in the field? How do you prove that it doesn't rise to the level of proof -- with scientific proof or via repeating the repeaters who told you so? Actually, it doesn't matter and won't change anything. Something else is going on here -- and not only with you. I remember reading a sci-fi novel, so long ago that by now I don't remember either the author or the title, that impressed me forever with one image in the end that contained the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Basically, the protagonists were stuck in an induced artificial mind-altering field that distorted everything they perceived. They were on earth in the range of this field but they believed that as a result of some scientific experiment they participated in they'd been thrown onto some other planet way in deep space, a planet whose laws of physics were different. They explored and described them eventually, creating the science of this world in line with what they perceived, theories, practices, everything very elaborate, a whole civilization designed accordingly. In their perceived world, e.g., the sun was a disc, visibly spinning in the sky like a giant top, due to some space distortions as they thought, which they measured and described scientifically. They lived in isolation for a few generations, then they were discovered. Turned out some crazy scientist conducted an experiment, somewhere in the uninhabited parts of the earth, with a group of his theories' followers, and once the machine was turned on and everybody's perceptions distorted, they believed -- well, they believed what they perceived, but their perceptions themselves were secondary, artificially induced, and yet all the considerable powers of their intellects were put to the task of coming up with explanations and justifications for this INDUCED reality, brushing off EVERYTHING that didn't conform. They lived hard, unhealthy lives and died before their time, generation after generation, but they designed a world that was "working" -- on the premises that were faulty from the start, but "functional," not the best of all possible worlds but the only one they knew how to live in. Then, when they were discovered and everything that happened to them got revealed (because in the greater world it was common knowledge that something went awry with a group of scientists following a particular doctrine a few generations ago), the 'normals' who showed up explained the deal to everybody and turned off the machine inducing the mind-altering (and "objective" reality-altering) perceptions. Most people in the group recovered -- some fast, some gradually -- and started perceiving the world as it is minus the induced distortion for the fist time. The laws of physics themselves were different now, and the first taste of normality was sweet... but not for everybody. The main protagonist -- too invested in his mission in the distorted world, too convinced, too smart, too you-can't-fool-me, too... too much a fanatic of his own beliefs to believe they weren't his own... still saw the DISC of the sun spinning at a great speed in the sky, like he always had. There was no field acting on him anymore -- and yet there was no convincing him. He had internalized the machine and embodied it. He was now generating the distortions of reality independently of the outside influences. No amount of proof could ever prove anything to him anymore. Once he saw the disc, he would always see the disc.

http://www.gasresources.net/Introduction.htm

I didn't take it this time, I did in the past, different versions, got pegged as an ENFP by one and INFP by another. Which makes sense to me because I definitely can go both ways -- "leaving the world" and "coming into the world," a taoist schtick. I have a test I got via an oral transmission from a Jungian psychologist a long time ago, which IMO is better suited to assess a community like this one because it is taken in a state of meditation of sorts (guided imagery/visualization). I used it a couple of times at other forums in the past, it was fun, but then I was told by someone that it was too heavy duty for fun, too close to the secretes the unconscious usually hides and guards so they can't be touched by superficial prying by the Myers-Briggs and the MMPI and the rest of them behavioral goodies. Scared some folks... so I don't know if I should use it here. If there's takers, I might though.

Yup. They are known as San Niang days but I have a habit of calling them fucko days. The 3rd, 7th, 13th, 18th, 22nd and 27th day of each lunar month. I have noticed that the broken energy starts coming in around the time of the moonrise the day before, and eases off around midnight of the actual San Niang day. Your TCM practitioner is good! In my experience, being mindful of these days is half the battle no matter what you undertake. Meaning, don't undertake anything important and especially important and new on these days.

You know, your jabs actually distract from the deeper thoughts you offer in the same helping, and tend to monopolize the reader's attention. Is that their intended function? -- 'cause if it isn't, keep in mind that that's what actually happens -- your most convincing points can't get the full benefit of careful consideration because, you know, the jabs added in the same breath piss people off, and being pissed off makes more anti-intellectuals out of any crowd than just about anything else. Did you know that in someone engaged in a hostile verbal confrontation the IQ drops 30 points and does not recover for the next few hours, and sometimes days and even weeks? Scientific fact. What is championed in this forum is outlined in the guidelines. I don't remember them mentioning anti-intellectualism specifically as a policy or goal. Nor have I seen much "anti-intellectualism" here. What I've seen is people of different educational, empirical, age, country, "rate of living life" backgrounds. I see people of varying IQ levels, emotional intelligence levels, coming from lives that have been hard or easy or over-easy on them, cushioned by privilege of a lucky birth or nearly demolished and stretched to the outer limits of what a human being can endure, with most falling somewhere in the middle between the extremes but not all, coming here and talking to each other about things of interest to them at this particular moment. There's no intellectual or ideational prerequisites for participation posted or enforced. I too occasionally feel that too many people say too many dumb things and get frustrated and discouraged, but the funny thing is, your "dumb things" and mine do not coincide. I have never been undereducated so I don't know what it's like to see the light of the scientific method late in the game -- maybe it is indeed better than to never see it at all, but when are you going to get over it? I had Ph.D.s in four generations that went before, and was asked to spell-check my father's Ph.D. thesis in thermodynamics when I was 10. I got over it.

The next hexagram flowing from the one I've just talked about (looks like we've posted simultaneously) mentions fighting dragons whose "blood is red and yellow." Yellow is, traditionally, the color associated with earth, and red, with heaven (red sun). A red day of the calendar always commemorates the antics of the rulers who ascribe the "mandate of heaven" to their rulings. Semiotics is fun. I've accumulated quite a library of books on signs and symbols, and one thing I can assert with certainty is that nothing in our man-made environment is left to chance. I don't know what "we" may think of encoding stuff in symbols, but I do know by now that "they" take it VERY seriously. Nothing is done without amplification with symbols chosen according to the (always) hidden purpose but displayed in plain sight. (It has to be displayed in order to work -- symbols work on the unconscious level, but they do need to be perceived in order to start working.)

The calendar is indeed bogus, the numbers, however, known as Flying Stars to a practitioner of taoist arts and sciences, are anything but. Digital clocks run on quartz crystals which know more than all humans combined about the geometry of spacetime, the directionality of qi (you know that qi is a vector rather than a scalar, right?), and if you have ever seen a good undamaged specimen, you know that the shape of the number 1 is natural, not made up. Digital clocks utilize the part of quartz crystals' Xuan Kong (space-time manipulation techniques) which some humans have retrieved, to a very modest extent. While others (e.g. shamans who have worked with quartz crystals for aeons, taoist Xuan Kong practitioners, and the like) have retrieved other parts of this knowledge, the ones that have eluded the engineer of the digital clock. Billions of digital clocks set to show IIIIII simultaneously means hundreds of billions of quartz crystals aligned in a repetitive identical pattern all at once. The ganying, resonance power of such a global machine set in motion is anyone's guess. I do have a guess though. IIIIII is Hexagram I, Heaven. Also known as extreme yang. Has to do with the appearance and fights and flights of headless dragons, if you are familiar with the I Ching. "The arrogant dragon will have cause to repent." IIII added to the extreme flying-fighting-dragon yang of the moment amplifies it. What's extreme yang good for? Far as I'm concerned, for slaying the arrogant dragon at the moment when it's headless. Other than that, I dunno. I've studied taoist numerology for feng shui, astrological, herbal, medical, and divinational applications. I would know what to look for to add or decrease the yang energy of a system -- any system. Meditation with candles will amplify it. So I'm not going to do it. And would strongly discourage everybody else. This world does NOT suffer from yang deficiency.

FWIW, I don't doubt your integrity and hold you in high esteem for its consistent manifestations. The problem lies elsewhere between us. I don't think most people have a clue about anything at all, but whoever has a clue or believes he/she does either enjoys (or in my case laments) having it and tries to share it with those he/she believes don't have this particular clue, or, alternatively, grabs it as a baseball bat of intellectual, moral, educational, etc., superiority and hits those who he/she thinks don't have it on the head. That's what I usually object to. FWIW, Russian research denies "peak oil" and geologists have been consistently finding deposits thereof based on the theoretical premises flowing quite scientifically from precisely this "denial." You don't read Russian, do you? I've worked for Russia's Ministry of Oil and Gas Industries for a number of years, reporting directly to its then Minister. If I "deny" peak oil, it's not necessarily a lack of education that is the reason why. FWIW, I do believe the world is screwed, however I'm far more radical than you in my assessment of how and why exactly. Nothing is what it seems. I think anyone who begins to grasp this fact has to come to a place of tolerance of others' misconceptions. Out there, there's nothing but. A comfy compartmentalized pocket of "knowledge" some of us mistake for "truth and wisdom" could have been sewn onto your mind with crafty needles of deceit... you enjoy digging in that pocket for its treasures, I enjoy (or rather lament) tracing the tailor's crooked needles to their crooked manufacturers. Doesn't make me wrong on autopilot... or Jetsun, or anyone else. We're all doing the best we can.

As a taoist traditionalist I hold no belief in the existence of an "ego" -- my psychophysiology contains jing, qi, Greater shen, Lesser (heart) shen, hun, po, yi, zhi, each of these wuxing-propelled and wuji-taiji-cycling between xiantian and houtian. Consequently, I can't go past something that's not there to find something I'm not looking for.

Ain't that the truth. A few caveats though: ayahuasca is not a drug; there's no such thing as ayahuasca addiction; denying subjective experiences on the basis of their not qualifying as "real, demonstrable phenomena" can be used in the manner you used it to deny, e.g., one's love for one's spouse or child, since loving someone is not a "demonstrable phenomenon" and is "real" only to the extent it is real in one's heart -- it is one of the phenomena of expanded consciousness (someone else, whose consciousness has not expanded to love YOUR spouse, may deny its reality if he so chooses, because the phenomenon is outside his own consciousness); so, do we belittle people who had mentioned at any point that they love somebody as having invalidated their objectivity?.. do we put them down whenever they happen to express an opinion we don't share?.. do we presume their opinions are fubar and they themselves are fair game for put-downs because they have had experiences we didn't?.. ayahuasca is used, more successfully than all of our medical establishments combined, to break drug addictions, among other things; people prone to addictive behaviors, a group you may or may not have some first-hand experience with, have nothing on those who successfully break their addictions instead of juggling them and substituting one for the next for the next for the next, and might do well not taking condescending stances toward them; the drug of denial is, e.g., alcohol, and people who have first hand experience with its denial-inducing effects do tend to project them on non-drug-induced states of consciousness which they have no familiarity with, i.e. are exhibiting exactly the kind of behavior (projection of personal problems onto someone else) Jetsun was talking about. (There's another thread going on right now where chronic alcohol users teach ayahuasca initiates what their experience is "really" about, projecting what they know from their experience with alcohol on what the non-drug-user, ayahuasca initiate, knows about non-drug-induced consciousness phenomena; this seems to be pretty common behavior among addiction sufferers, but whether this behavior is induced by their drug of choice, alcohol, or is just a dictate of their idiosyncratic personality, I wouldn't presume to know); and if I haven't convinced you yet that the joke was in poor taste, think back to your motivation for having a little fun at someone else's expense in this manner, maybe it will become apparent to you.

The whole of humanity throughout the whole of its history (until some 120 years ago when a new German paradigm of schooling was proposed by a few powerful members of the ruling class and implemented first in the West and then globally) accepted that these beings are perceived because they, um, exist. The first alkaloid isolated from ayahuasca (out of many, most of which have functions science can't begin to understand -- to say nothing of their synergistic action -- which is one reason I'm vehemently opposed to drugs, the isolates of substances, and more so to the use of the word "drug" to refer to a plant that is infinitely more complex than any drug and infinitely removed from the latter if only by virtue of this unmatched complexity) -- I was saying -- the alkaloid was named telepathine, because this happens to be an accurate description of the effects induced by its ingestion: people become telepathic. I don't know what happens when they take an isolated alkaloid, but in the whole complex totality of the experience, what happens is manifold and farther out than any far-out far-outness you can think up (the neocortex can't think up what ayahuasca can show and tell, no way... it's not equpped) -- but the simplest thing that happens is, you might gain telepathic rapport with other members of the tribe... er... participants of the ceremony. This was the very first thing that happened to me, actually, before the rest of it kicked in. I was trying to determine whether anything at all was going to happen or not (I had no nausea whatsoever and wasn't sure if I under-dosed or something, initially), when out of the blue I knew the name of someone present in the maloka. That was pretty weird, because we had arrived in the jungle late that day and, after resting a bit, proceeded straight to the ceremony without having met anyone else. So, not only had I never met that guy ever before, not only did I not even know he existed, but, the ceremony taking place in complete darkness, couldn't possibly tell him from the next blob of darkness, whether empty or filled with a human form. All of a sudden I knew there's someone by such and such name there (a rare one) and called him, mentally, by his name. He approached and said, "yes? you called me?" -- without saying a word. "Well, I called out such and such name..." "Right. That's my last name." And so on. We were in telepathic communication with this guy for the rest of the ceremony. This couldn't be "collective unconscious" since a rare last name that happens to have personal significance for me (for reasons that make the presence of a guy with this name a LOT weirder to begin with -- he simply shouldn't have been there by accident... yet he was) can't be explained away like that at all. So, the next thing that might happen is, you gain telepathic access to other beings, and not all of them are necessarily humans. Not all of them are necessarily on this planet. Not all of them are necessarily in this dimension. Not all of them are necessarily restricted in their activities by ANY dimensionality. And so on. There's no limits. At least in my experience. But there's a commonality of experience for people who happen to get to the same place. There's places where She will take those who She thinks won't lose their mind from visiting them. It's like a restricted area where an investigator must go, so She will take you there unless She knows it will undo your marbles. One such place is where she rarely takes "civilized" people, but all indigenous visitors discuss it the way you'd discuss a Starbucks on the corner with your friends who've all been there done that. She took me there. I have no more way to "prove" it than the fact that I dropped by a Starbucks today at lunchtime and had a cup of coffee and a pepperjack cheese croissant. Nothing of this nature can be proved except experientially, and that's why "objectivity" is the biggest joke ever told/sold to the dumbest species in the universe, which is us. Sacred plants remove the Great Wall between "subjective" and "objective" and unite participants in an experience that is both and neither. They have been vilified precisely because enslavers of humanity fear only one thing -- a humanity united, a humanity no longer divided into "subjective" and "objective" experience, a humanity that is both and neither and much greater than either and greater than the sum of both and greater than anything they could do anything about. Our current state is the direct outcome of deforestation -- what did you think civilization was all about?..

Enlightenment, a concept cherished by sun-worshiping species (the cold-blooded light-and-heat-activated reptiles), was certainly not part of "those shamanic practices" that created and perpetuated human history for hundreds of thousands of years. I'm not at all convinced that selling this tall tale to humans by Marduk and the nagas and the rest of them creepy crawly critters had humans' best interest at heart to begin with. Bon, with its powerful but (alas) peaceful shamans and hundreds of thousands of peaceful practitioners, was destroyed with extreme prejudice by the invading buddhists (sic), and the best of Tibetan Buddhism is what remains of Bon that, as a bright afterthought, they managed to incorporate instead of eliminating. Karmically speaking, what the Chinese communists did to Tibetan buddhists is exactly what Tibetan buddhists did to Tibetan Bon practitioners earlier, to answer your question. And at least one of the people in the pics you posted is a ruthless fraud, embezzler of money obtained through manipulating the public with tall tales of compassionate missions that were in reality a self-serving crusade for power, and a not-so-petty tyrant who managed to fool the world (power-hungry tyrants are known to do that on occasion, you know). And so on. I could, but won't, give you much of the "so on," but I'll limit myself to this one item for consideration maybe at some later date: a little bird told me that the absolute worst karmic sin of them all is taking the side of the oppressor against the oppressed. If you examine the history of destruction of shamanism by institutionalized religions, and figure out who the oppressor has been, consistently, for many hundreds of blood-soaked years, in this long and merciless story of enslavement of the human spirit, maybe you will want to change sides someday... Till if/then, I'm resting my case.

Check out Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Schultes. A superbly researched treatise on the subject, it has photographs of holy men in India, Nepal, Tibet, etc. smoking ganja from humongous hookas, enveloped in thick clouds of psychedelic smoke, in strict accordance with their ancient traditions. Yogis, Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists... everybody who is anybody in the world of spiritual pursuit outside the jurisdiction of the FDA and its clones. 1/3 of all sacred Hindu sutras are glorifications of the ganja, did you know that? Of course no shaman in his (or shamanka in her) right mind takes DMT, to say nothing of much viler lab-created substances, whether mind-altering prescription drugs or street drugs, that are addictive and destructive. There are no drug users among shamans. Drugs are not sacred. Drugs are profane. Sacred plants taken for sacred purposes are sacred, however. Have always been, despite centuries of persecutions by the fathers of the church and their modern arms of enforcement, suppression, falsification, profiteering from profane substitutes while criminalizing the sacred, relentless brainwashing, and so on.

Both would be good choices for a beginner. Also Eva Wong's "The Shambala Guide to Taoism." And "The Watercourse Way" by Alan Watts. I hated it without even reading it, just skimming through a few pages.

No one who does taiji under a lineage master has ever shared this opinion. Everybody else... well, people like having opinions, don't they? Opinions are human, taiji is divine. Taiji is not only taoist, it is taoist to the core. There's pretty much nothing about it that is anything else. Ti taiji, ti tao -- embody taiji and you embody tao.