Taomeow

Has anyone read The Coming Race (1871), by Edward Bulwer-Lytton? I got interested because someone in the know asserts it's as much nonfiction masked as fiction, based on being privy to the plans of secret societies the authors were members of, as Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World." Thinking of checking it out -- anyone know if it's worth it?

My pleasure. It really happened, you know. The Native American medicine man I mentioned told me a story of his own "spiritual mistake" that got me thinking too... He was on a boat in the ocean and started talking to some spirits and an aquatic animal showed up, so close that he was able to pet it! He was thrilled, and told some folks afterwards how he had a chance to stroke and pet a dolphin who responded to his call, and how much love and trust and a kind of kindred spirit was expressed and exchanged between them, mentioning among other things the sensations in his hand as he petted the dolphin -- the skin on its back was like sandpaper, he said, and the dolphin almost scraped off my palm in its exuberance of spirit... That's when someone told him, ...er... ...like sandpaper?.. -- that's not a dolphin, that's a shark. The dolphin's skin is smooth like silk to the touch. The shark's is like sandpaper. I'm not sure I know what the moral of the story is, but knowing the guy, I can understand why he would spiritually relate to the shark but mistake it for a dolphin. I think it's a very common kind of spiritual self-misunderstanding.

Oh, good. You've discovered sex.

So, the first try has taught me that two proverbs, a Chinese and a Russian one, are right on the money: "don't travel in two boats simultaneously by placing one foot in each,"' and "if you chase after two rabbits at once, you'll catch neither." Meaning, it is probably better to take turns -- one is a student, the other one is a mentor -- and give a month to each before changing roles -- than trying to combine teaching a new student and learning a new skill. I had to review what I know on lucid dreaming and only yesterday found exactly what I wanted to share to begin with (a taoist routine for LD that requires some preparation/prerequisites on the part of the student... I forgot completely that I used to do this one, LD is not at the center of my own current practices and hasn't been in a long enough time for me to forget some of the best stuff); while Michael found something from the start that resonated with him (an LD/kabbalah combo which I'm not familiar with), so we probably needed a month dedicated exclusively to his work to sort things out. In the meantime, I got busy in RL and Michael's excellent material, instructions, and experience with the subject he was to teach me (ecstatic kaballah) didn't quite elicit the kind of dedication from me they deserve, because I was juggling too many balls while jumping through too many hoops as it were. So, I still want to pursue the study, but better timing would yield better results... Hence my experience-derived advice to others who might follow suit: don't travel in two boats simultaneously by placing one foot in each, and don't chase after two rabbits at once or you'll catch neither.

Wow! What a yao! Meow!

Thank you. A cultural joke indeed. I remember a discussion with someone over the meaning/translation of "te" which made me realize that in English, "te" is spelled "inTEgrity." It is an inTEgral part of being able to inTEgrate. Bill Gates is one of the devils of hell, and the penchant of the devil for making evil masquerade as good is a registered trademark of evil well established in worldwide traditions. To come up with such "judgement," a cultivated ability to inTEgrate moral and intellectual functions is a prerequisite; while throwing a camouflage blanket of non-judgement over any and all moral and intellectual functions of one's psyche is a prerequisite for DISinTEgration of both.

Anamatva, thank you for posting on Scotty's behalf. Scotty, thank you for your analysis! You are spot on -- people who guess numbers correctly in PSI tests are known to transpose them on occasion -- when one-digit ones are presented in sequence, some people see the NEXT number that will be presented before they see the current one, and sometimes the next after the next. That's exactly what my perceptions were like when I took one of those tests -- I saw the next-in-line number or the one after it, consistently. Never tried it with two- or three-digit numbers, should be fun. Ya Mu's actual choice of the number is intriguing to me too with this perspective in mind -- the license plate on my car says 6339.

"Meaningful" and "mental" are not the same. I suspect it's not the most psychic and qi-attuned of us who win lotteries. Have you ever heard of a high level master using his or her powers to hit the jackpot?.. I haven't. That's because lottery numbers are not meaningful, and high level masters are good at deciphering meaningful messages from the universe, and the prerequisite for being able to do that is the ability to screen out meaningless ones, random noise. So they may be worse rather than better at winning lotteries than the rest of us, because they start out by not buying the ticket. They may miss out on all the dumb luck this way... but there's only so much dumb luck to go around in the universe... so they bet on something else. Something meaningful.

Well, let's look at the evidence. You said, "HERE is the number." Capitalizing "here" to make sure it's not missed. It is a straightforward English sentence, like "Pi is a number" or "X is a number." So asserting that "HERE" is THE number, you are offering grammatical and mathematical evidence that the number to find is the numeric value of the word "HERE." Numeric values of words are calculated via gematria. I gave you 36, which is the value of HERE in simplified gematria, but of course I can't be sure that you used that, so in case you used Hebrew or English gematria, HERE is 98 (Hebrew) or HERE is 216 (English) or HERE is 36 (simplified) Any other number you say "HERE" is gotta be a trick answer. Regardless of what that may be, I look forward to the DVD.

36

Memory is identical with consciousness. ("Computer memory" is a misleading misnomer. It's not memory. It's a storage system, a mnemonic aid, much like sperm. Computers don't remember, they just respond to orders -- "go there, get that" -- they don't decide where to go and what to get and, most importantly, WHY. They have no free will, are not conscious, and will never be no matter how well we learn to teach them to fake it.) You know you have "the unconscious," right? Get rid of that.

Indo-European via Sumer. But they either didn't know about jing or (much more likely) didn't tell. We've been told in one shape or form or another that our bodies aren't worth shit ever since we became enslaved. Don't buy it. Buy the owner's manual, the true owner, you, and find out what your body really is before ditching it. For at least 45,000 years, people knew that the human body (correction... the woman's body) is the body of the universe. All over Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas archeologists have been digging out thousands of small female figures made of stone, clay, bronze, bone, etc. (and almost none of the male body, something like 1 male per 1000 female figurines found), with all her sex characteristics exaggerated, which humans all over the world were stubbornly making and worshiping for at least 45,000 years uninterrupted, maybe longer. Then someone came and said the human body is worthless in general and the woman's body especially. That's where our troubles began. Egyptians, however, still persevered for a few thousand years in valuing and preserving at least those bodies they thought were special -- to wit, pharaohs and cats.

Very good. Jing is this way too. Memory is dynamic and encompasses the future. How does an acorn know it is a mighty oak? and how could it become one if it didn't remember? Jing is the know-how of being and becoming, the child of memory and the mother of consciousness, with the mother and child constantly swapping places. Tao fa ziran!

I have to agree with Thelerner. Into my life confidence comes from competence. Competence, to me, means internalized and integrated experience. Knowing who I am and who I'm not, and knowing what I know for sure and what I don't know for sure. If you neither mistake one for the other nor fake one or the other, confidence runs deep -- nothing can make a dent. If you make a decision instead to behave a certain way and not to behave a certain different way, confidence acquired this way is superficial and can only hold up to minor tests but will collapse under serious ones. Which is why I don't do stuff like "transforming anger" before I let myself know and feel I really am angry instead of disowning my own feelings in a hurry just because they are not approved by a system of this or that indoctrination. I feel entitled to know what it is I really feel, to be aware. I'm human. Feeling anger when things happen that warrant it is human. Not letting any doctrine take any of your humanity away is divine. As for fear, the remedy is courage, and whatever falls short is, again, superficial. Cultivate courage and honesty and you will be one very confident camper. It is very attractive, by the way, when people acknowledge rather than hide their own limitations. Being honest and courageous is something quite a few will find naturally attractive. And being perceived as attractive not because you decided that you should (i.e. faking it out of insecurity) but because whatever you are when you are yourself is perceived this way has a side effect of making you attractive to others, which will nurture your confidence in its turn.

So how is a "memory of that" not memory?

No one can increase, preserve, or avoid squandering jing who doesn't understand what jing is. It's like trying to save money while thinking that money is ocean pebbles. There's many who attempt cultivating jing without understanding that jing is neither a substance nor an energy to exactly the same extent that ocean pebbles are not money. Anyone who says increasing jing is something that can't be done has attempted to take pebbles to the bank and make a deposit to his account and was unsuccessful in increasing his wealth. Jing is memory. Jing is universal, cosmic memory, your particular species memory, your specific ancestral lineage memory, and your personal prenatal memory combined. The only way to increase jing is to unblock unconscious memory, the "frozen funds." If you don't understand memory, with its "first in last out" ways, you don't understand jing. If you look for jing elsewhere, you won't find it. I too read all those books that say that jing is this or that substance or energy. It isn't. This or that (e.g. semen in men and reproductive forces in women and libido in both) are manifestations of jing. A manifestation of jing is not jing. The human system remembers how to make another human. This memory -- that's jing. Broader still, life remembers how to make more life. This memory -- that's jing. It's not the semen that remembers, some species life produces produce none. Semen is a mnemonic device life uses to remember how to make more of certain species of live creatures, is all. Jing is not a mnemonic device, it is memory itself -- it is consciousness, for memory and consciousness are one. The amount of jing we have at birth is infinite. The amount of jing available for use is a different story... every event that suppresses consciousness and relegates a memory to the unconscious arrests some of our jing. We arrest way more jing than we burn up. Jing is memory both onthogenic and philogenic. Most of it must be arrested or you will manifest the traits of all species in the galaxy and beyond all at once -- if all jing manifests indiscriminately you get a monster of chaos as the outcome. But civilized people suppress most of human-proper jing, keeping it dormant, immobilized, inactive, asleep, or outright killing it. They fail to manifest the full extent of their humanity as a result. So to get access to extra jing is not a matter of gaining it from the environment or conserving it so as not to disperse it into the environment, as much as it is a matter of gaining access to its source. The source is within... and it's infinite. If you understand the difference between "infinite" and "readily available," that's a start. Many spiritually inclined folks mistake one for the other, and not for purposes of jing alone. There's nothing less available than what you don't even know that you forgot. Oh, and false memories don't take you there. Talking about the prenatal state or pre-birth state or the state of unity with confidence of someone who has live unbroken memories of getting from that state to the present with no gaps in them will only take you farther astray and dump more non-memory (non-jing), fabrications, over the already deeply-buried real deal.

I don't know what it is, but I did it and got a clue as to what it's for. Major acupressure impact on the LI11 (Quchi) point. This is a good digestion pose.

I had no idea it was unfinished. I think it is complete. He just pioneered the literary device of a tension-infused ending. The translators were raised on either happily-ever-after or (occasionally) tragic endings and simply didn't get it, what do you think?

Welcome, Alibabachi! The coolest and most meaningful translation I'm aware of goes, "Tao patterns itself on itself."

Yes, that's quite true. In fact, the larger "spacetimescape" (the taoist counterpart of a "landscape") is always more fundamental, it dictates parameters of great-scale changes that for purposes of a human life, or even the life of a whole civilization, are not perceptible as changes and appear as something unchanging or even eternal. Like, you know, the sun and moon and stars. They are all pretty temporary in the grand scheme of things, but for our lifetime, and for the lifetime of a whole bunch of civilizations, they have been the "canvas," the immutable (well, almost...) backdrop. Which doesn't mean they can't change when their time comes. Taoist astrology looks at 120,000 year stretches (and can look beyond, but doesn't see the point) and then smaller cycles within that period -- 60,000, 20,000, and then progressively smaller, down to the 120-minute hour of the Chinese calendar, and then its 60-minute yang and 60-minute yin increments. (And could take it to a smaller scale but doesn't see the point. ) We live in a space-time fractal, and the larger spacetimescape always dictates what its smaller harmonics down the line will be like. So, knowing the larger picture means knowing things you can't change. While knowing the smaller harmonics of this fractal -- days, months, years -- means knowing things you can. That's free will in action. No small fry. I'm forever thrilled with taoist pragmatism -- free will is not an abstract concept to a practicing taoist, it is a tool that you either use or don't, and then when you use it, you can use it as a very clumsy unskilled worker whose creations have neither much beauty nor much utility, or even break stuff... or you can use it as a master, with precision and elegance -- and express your will in your creations that will harmonize with "the will of heaven and earth" -- the larger spacetimescape -- or even bend it to yours. Immortals are known to have done that, to have changed the course of heaven and earth. And they all had to start with the smaller-scale harmonics within themselves. I don't remember if Earth is your unlucky or neutral phase, I do seem to recall it's not a lucky one. If it is unlucky, it will interfere somewhat with your influx of the lucky Water, but all in all, any Water anywhere for Water-deficient Wood is all-around better than any other configuration, hands down. Any phase deficient in the Mother phase is primarily dependent on that. Right. Just remember that things that are out of balance seldom gain "more balance" from random application of forces. Something that is standing firmly and sturdily you can push any which way your heart tells you and it will stay put, just enjoying the stimulation. But something that stands on edge... you really need to know which way to push and which way to pull to give it more stability rather than drop it and break it. So, people with balanced charts seldom go wrong when they listen to their heart and do whatever, but people with unbalanced charts (the vast majority of people alive today, per my experience) are quite prone to leaning in directions in which they are ALREADY leaning BECAUSE of the imbalance. And another thing... "Listen to your heart," in wuxing terms, means "listen to Fire." You personally would benefit much more from listening to your Kidneys.

You know, it's possible... ...but I only know what mine looks like. One of the reasons the theory seemed credible to me is that I recognized this light -- I've seen it as a very small child, pretty much always if I closed my eyes and wasn't distracted by something else. I used to play with it, moving it this way and that, in different patterns, at different levels of brightness... wondering what it was, noticing that it was basically a good feeling to see it, somewhere between very comforting and very mysterious. And then as an adult I mostly forgot about it, and whenever I remembered, I noticed it wasn't what it used to be, and sometimes I couldn't see it at all, or else just faintly. So, a practice that gathers it doesn't feel like something made up or artificial because I know this light, always have, and know the feelings that come with it. Master Wang could see what was going on with it during the practice in all the practitioners. At one point he told me, after the practice, exactly where it "stuck" when I was moving it. Which was pretty amazing and exactly correct.

thanks for noticing! The lower element is the Earthly Branch. The upper is the Heavenly Stem. You can get a great match -- e.g. Water in the Stem and Wood in the Branch, and it will translate into a year where heaven nourishes earth, a good year. Or you can get, e.g., a conflict situation -- Metal in the Stem and Wood in the Branch, a stern control situation -- heavenly qi controlling earthly qi. So, in the stem-branch interactions, the nature of the relationship between the phases will play out -- when mother-child phases get to be paired up, the best year will be with mother above and child below, a worse one vice versa, and then you can get a grandmother-grandchild stem-branch interactions and they will be about control (grandmother on top) or rebellion (grandchild on top). The year 2012 will be heavenly Water over earthly Earth -- this is rebellion... Earth is supposed to control Water, but with Water on top it won't be controlled easily. The influences of the phases are the most powerful in the Day-master. I.e. the qi of the day takes precedence over all else. Calculating into the future -- get a Chinese almanac, or learn to do it by hand (some teachers teach how), or figure it out -- you get a cycle of generation, you get a yang year followed by a yin year for each phase, you have 10 stems and 12 branches -- start with any known overlap (e.g. with 2012 in which I just told you what the qi will be like -- oh, and it's yang) and chart as far as you have the patience. But there's tons to know besides that -- I usually wind up bailing out of these topics because there's no bottom... you take a step and it leads deeper into the rabbit hole! Anyway, the main energy in an individual life is that of the day (in the life of the cosmos it's bigger, obviously...), so you need to learn a few things about how to assess that and, what's more important, follow up. Think of it this way. Imagine you're painting a portrait of the year -- say, of the Dragon ruling the year. The qi of the year is the canvas, the size of your dragon will be limited by its dimensions... the qi of the month is your palette and your brushes... and the qi of the day is where you paint the eye on your portrait! -- and the qi of the hour is... a sudden phone call and you're startled and your hand smears a nasty streak across the painting, or, alternatively, you get a sudden moment of divine inspiration and you add a stroke that turns the work of an amateur into a work of genius... but more often, all that happens within the hour is just a slight shift in the light, is all. It all depends.

Well, "taiji" is the level of duality (yin-yang), the level of oneness is "wuji," and the definitive authority on that is not master Hua Ching Ni of a heavily buddhist-influenced tradition. Wuji is not part of the buddhist tradition, and taoism proper has never ascribed "light, no darkness" features to it. What taoism proper knows about it is that it is "unmanifest" -- nothing is manifest, not light, not darkness, at the level of oneness. Hijacking wuji to promote the pro-light anti-dark agenda has complex historic roots worth studying. I have...