Taomeow

My pre-taoist infatuation was smart drugs. I experimented with everything under the sun. Read every book on the subject and was a member of CERI forum and a few others. I even managed to get into arguments with Marvin Minsky, also a member, and Stephen Fowkes and Ward Dean. (I had no taoism and a lot of arrogance at the time. ) I learned how to trip my brains out absolutely legally utilizing cholinergic pathways. The memorable event was a load-dose of nootropics that connected my left and right brain hemispheres overnight (well at least the neocortex, the midbrain and the lower brain were a LOT trickier and took a few eventful years to master), effectively turning me into a whole-brainer instead of the usual deal where you're either a left-brainer or a right-brainer or you keep switching, sometimes this, sometimes that. When you connect everything, you don't want to overconnect or you go schizophrenic like Western science, or like globalist economy, or like the internet, who needs the CIA collecting shit from Facebook?.. Brain-augmenting substances (and most practices that will "go there" by breaking the locks with a crowbar because, well, they don't have the key ) don't have any built-in protective mechanisms, you start connecting, you don't know where to stop. Taoism, on the other hand, limits all meaningful situations in the universe to exactly 64. This, I can handle. Whereas nootropics that can tweak with this or that brain function are legion (although the original and the best, Piracetam, is still the best, between safety and efficiency.)

I hear you loud and clear! Meow... I mean, miao... is understood as the mysterious border between yin and yang -- if you look at the taiji symbol, the S-line separating them (miaotao or taomiao) is also uniting them, is not really there but is clearly visible, does not belong to either yin or yang but is shared by both while itself being neither... and is shaped like a cat's... um... meow.

Very good stuff. I was taught a version of this. You squat while keeping your spine absolutely erect (top of head and tailbone aligned on one line perpendicular to the floor). While slowly squatting, you don't let your tailbone go out, don't stick your butt out at any point. Mind the knees! They have to have no part in the action whatsoever, short of bending strictly forward strictly over the toes pointing strictly forward, and make sure you don't twist them sideways at any point. This is actually a meditation pose, the palms are held together in front of the chest. Disclaimer: this is not safe for everybody, there's a risk to the knees -- don't do it unless you're 100% prepared to blame only yourself and not me should something go wrong.

When I was in Peru, I followed the jungle diet for some three weeks. ( Don't ask what happened next... I got out of the jungle and flew to Lima and there found myself in Miraflores, the part of Lima that is "not third world" unlike the rest of it, and discovered alfresco de maracuya, and was lost to all healthy endeavors for the duration of the availability. It is a kind of cake made with maracuya fruit, and it is the single most mind-blowing dessert I've ever had in my life. They sold it at a little coffee shop next to my hotel on the street named Grau -- remember the Grau dynasty of sorcerers associated with Castaneda and Tahisha Abelar? -- they must have had a hand in creating that cake or something, it totally bewitched me. I made a trip to that coffee shop thrice daily for the next slice. Even talking about it makes me salivate.) So anyway, the jungle diet. Fish and seafood, mostly raw with lemon juice or vinegar; fresh eggs (the hen lived under the stove in the shaman's kitchen); several varieties of potatoes -- some unknown to me before and all delicious; plenty of bananas and plantains, which are mostly eaten cooked (and are, again, delicious); many local fruits unknown to me before; coconuts -- the road from Iquitos that terminates in the jungle runs along a bunch of small villages and their inhabitant sell huge (the size of a volleyball) coconuts with hard shells removed and a hole drilled and a straw inserted to motorists of the passing-by vehicles of great weirdness (there's no cars in Iquitos, but don't let me digress) for a soft drink, and then the coconut itself is smashed and munched on for "junk food." Of very special note is a local fruit called aguaje, which is consumed in great quantities on a daily basis. That's another addiction I rapidly acquired there and still can't get over its total unavailability elsewhere. It is something you can eat for breakfast (and many people do) because it is very nutritious, and it's not sweet -- the taste is (to me) like grilled cheese with nutty overtones, but I've seen it described very differently, I guess it's many things to many people. It is reputed to support female health and hormonal balance, and women in that part of Peru make sure they eat it daily for beauty. All of it is sold in Iquitos by small local vendors. Now there's a "farmer's market" where the town meets the jungle, and people living in the jungle bring their fares to sell there, on the bank of the river. They come by boat. I've seen boatloads of huge tortoises sold for food. Dozens of varieties of fish, the kinds I'd never seen before, or knew existed. Grub kabobs on a stick, a delicacy -- that was one thing I didn't have the guts to try. Vegetables, from "common" to esoteric. I haven't seen any wheat, corn, soy, or dairy there.

Reminded me of Jim Morrison's response to those who were concerned that he'd gained too much weight: "There's nothing wrong with being a large mammal."

Cool! Welcome to the hands-on legs-on everything-moves ranks of tao sympathizers. The ibis video you posted is indeed a nice intro to taiji -- notice the leg work, no double weighted steps -- the whole weight (or most of it) on one leg at a time. This helps him glide over the uneven terrain with great stability (despite the matchstick thinness of the legs) without losing energy to wobbling and bouncing up and down. Embodying the knowledge of the distinction between "heavy" and "light" makes it easy to choose "light" and fly! Thoth knows taiji!

Yes, and it's a good book.

Besides oral transmissions from my teachers, I've gleaned some information from a few sources, of which the one I have handy to reference here is titled "Book of Changes and Traditional Chinese Medicine," by Yang Li, published by Beijing Science and Technology Press in 1998. The translation is absolutely atrocious, but the information is invaluable. Here's the title page credentials: "Yang Li, professor at the Graduate Department of the TCM Institute of China, is a well-known expert in Yi science and TCM theorist. Her works have made great contributions to the dissemination of Chinese culture. (...) The Book of Changes and Traditional Chinese Medicine was awarded the World Golden Prize of Taiji Science in 1993 (...), the National Prize for Outstanding Books on Science and Technology, (and a bunch of others.) (...)" Chapter 24 of this work titled "Book of Changes and Sexology" references a number of important Chinese/taoist works on sexology dating from the most ancient times, and outlines the basic principles and practices of healthy, healing, and cultivation-geared sexual activities as understood by these authentic sources. Of note is Section 5 -- "The Application of the Decrease-Increase Theory to sexual techniques recorded in the book Effective Prescriptions," but the whole chapter is worth the closest attention, as well as the whole volume, although I predict sound and fury over the way translators (who are several, Chinese, and inconsistent in their use of English terms chapter to chapter, on top of having no clue of the already-established ways to translate particular Chinese terms and concepts into English, on top of multiple other linguistic and semantic transgressions against humanity) have made much of it quite a bit more cryptic than it was ever meant to be.

Keep in mind that most men who present themselves as taoists are just Westerners who like the label and wear it over whatever they really are without this "whatever they are" being affected in the least. Some have picked up a few abhorrently wrong sexual practices from rather questionable sources. Most are circumcised and quite unaware that none of the taoist texts have ever been geared toward circumcised men, who need a totally different practice. Real taoist bedchamber arts manuals have not been translated, to my knowledge, the ones that are available are mostly bull, or else fragmented snippets of knowledge useless in the absence of the whole enchilada. The only real taoists of supreme attainment whom I've met (not sexually, alas, all three are happily married) are plain vanilla sex-wise. Just like me. Sex has been invented by tao "first and foremost" -- it is the core of her most cherished endeavors -- so anyone trying to reinvent it, "improve" on it, make it "beat the real thing" better be VERY sure that they know what they're doing better than tao does. Tao invented plain vanilla. The very best chocolate syrup on top is useless if the ice cream itself is something you can't taste. Strawberries and cream on top are only masking the fact. Learn to taste it as is -- if you can't, that's your practice, learning what tao means when she says "sex." (I mean a generic "you," not anyone personally and particularly.)

Thanks for thinking of me, Witch! I was away for a while, but I'm back. Yes, the diet described is exactly what I always "peddle." Interestingly, the vegetalista shamans of the Amazon believe that their dieta is a crucial part of their spiritual endeavors, and the reason they strictly adhere to it is that in the worlds they travel to, wrong/unwholesome foods act as clearly visible barriers -- you can't get past the "demons" created by those foods, they stop or thwart your path. So the shamans don't consume the dieta for health, they consume it for professional competence. In other words, for spiritual health, first and foremost. Physical health is predicated on that -- to a shaman or a competent ayahuasquero, it is plainly obvious, because unhealthy stuff is really "stuff," it's not just a concept (or a misconception), not knowledge (or learned cluelessness) obtained second-hand via hearsay -- it's an entity that becomes available to your direct perceptions. I've seen them. (The demon of chlorine possessing water in your body, e.g., the easiest to recognize because he smells of what he is, will stick his rubbery fingers up your nose and throat and under your eyelids, and try to shred all your mucous membranes with pale bloodless fingernails. Ugh.)

OK, the scene takes place on a ship during a storm. When the brakes on the grand piano's legs are on, it is forced to keep still amidst the storm -- representing false yin. Watch what happens when they take the brakes off and true yin emerges. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=8dt3we8E7pQ And now please someone illustrate the Gen trigram.

The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper are also known as the Big Bear and the Little Bear, both female, and the Big Bear is thought of as the mother of the Little Bear who feeds her, well, milk. The cross formed by the Big Dipper pointing to four cardinal directions is the mother of all crosses including the true (and hidden) meaning of that of christianity. The Rose Cross of Rosicrucians and all the rose-pattern architectural designs in so many of Europe's cathedrals start making more sense if one considers the taoist alchemical name for Polaris -- the Purple Rose. Dawei, do you happen to know how the I Ching's 64 hexagrams relate to the 64 positions ("offices") of Taisui?

Dawei, excellent! I'll have more to say, gotta go now...

Right on. The problem is, people are set up to confuse desires born of true needs with desires born of frustrated needs. Discerning is tricky. Desires born of frustrated needs are the devil. These are the ones that can never be satisfied because they do nothing about the frustrated normal natural need they mask -- it's still there no matter how many masks it wears. Our whole civilization uses this Problem-Reaction-Solution method to sustain its abominable self: 1. (create a problem) make sure normal natural developmental needs are never met, and 2. (cause a reaction) once everybody is sufficiently frustrated on the deepest level, 3. (offer a solution that does not solve the original problem but looks like "something is being done about it") offer an infinite number of substitutes, send everybody on a wild goose chase forever. So anyone undertaking a discerning stance toward true needs and desires vs. sleight-of-hand substitutes takes on a whole civilization. Not easy. Still worth it.

Take on a practice in the general direction of "know thyself." Once you know yourself better, you will trust your perceptions more. Once you trust your perceptions, the decision about trusting or not trusting other people does not have to be made all in the head. Your gut feeling will tell you. Your heart will know. A refined "gut feeling" resides in the lower dantien, and the heart gets informed by the middle one. The head that reads books but does not communicate with the body and its qi always makes many mistakes no matter what it has read. Refine communication between different parts of you, invest into unifying them into the "whole you" -- and you will make fewer and fewer mistakes either way, trusting or not trusting.

Taoists have nothing against desire. All things normal and human are embraced. Taoism is not anti-life. If you are lonely, it is normal and human to want to have friendships and love in your life. If you were a taoist priest, some sects (not all) would require celibacy, but if you are not, not. One of my teachers, Master Wang Liping, was advised by his teachers to get married after years of strenuous taoist training, because it was decided that he would live in the world and be part of the worldly ways, and living in the world means what the I Ching refers to as "sameness with people." Taoists don't stick out like sore thumbs, shunning all things human, unless their lifestyle is explicitly that of "having left the world." This of course would entail more than one or two adjustments, and a loss of more than one or two desires. But when "coming into the world," they do no such thing. If you want to be scolded for having desires, join a buddhist forum.

I think different taoists will respond differently. One very taoist taoist asked me this question and led me toward thinking what he thinks -- to wit, that things "unnatural" are part of things "natural" just like "yin" is always part of "yang" and vice versa. I am still processing this idea. Here's some thoughts it has generated (work in progress, none carved in stone): I guess it's a matter of proportions. If you have "yang within yin" it's still yin, having some yang within is its inherent attribute, in fact part of its yin-ness. ("Pure yang" ideas later in taoism are borrowings from Indo-European modalities. These are un-taoist ideas within taoism, similar to seeds of yang within yin, which follows the original premise of taoism and does not render it un-taoist.) If you have increased the proportion of yang within yin to half and half, you have "balance" -- and within "balance" things don't stay put, not even for a second, given the perpetual motion of the manifest world and the manifest-unmanifest interplay. One of them flips the balance to its side. Thus, yang within yin, should it overgrow yin, will flip it into yang, with seeds of yin within. Similarly, unnatural things within naturalness, if they grow to balance, will not stay put -- they will flip. Should they flip toward more unnatural than natural, we'll have an unnatural world, with seeds of naturalness within. When it reaches its peak unnaturalness it won't be able to grow any more unnatural because "pure unnaturalness" is as impossible as "pure yang," and so it will start moving in the opposite direction -- the seeds of naturalness within an unnatural world will grow. So, the problem is local -- if you're born into a mostly-unnatural world, you can stunt the growth of things natural and speed up its collapse into naturalness, or you can stunt the growth of things unnatural and slow down or reverse this process, whichever you choose. "Taoists" are folks who choose to slow down this process, and taoist masters "graduated" to powerful sages may choose to reverse it. So, basically, things taoist are about co-creative choice, working with the universe in accordance with one's own preferences, imposing one's will on heaven and earth. Whereas "just going with the flow" is also taoist, but of a level of skill way inferior. So what is un-taoist then? Imposing one's will on taoists -- forbidding the practices, burning books and temples, imprisoning people for what they're up to in their own body and mind, concealing the Way with many false ways. This is unnatural and therefore it will flip. Taoism is not something that can be overcome. If you can be overcome, you're un-taoist. If you're un-taoist, you are going to flip your world toward tao. There's no fooling the Way.

The original I Ching arrangement is circular (see my avatar ). King Wen wrote the "linear" I Ching while imprisoned by the Shang tyrant. There was no Book of Changes of the Shang dynasty. The Zhouyi is the arrangement of the trigrams by the Duke of Zhou, King Wen's son, which is the most widespread version today and for quite a long time. In this arrangement, Heaven is the first hexagram. There is no record of either one of the authors worshipping heaven however. The reason Heaven is the first hexagram is very well explained in Ta Chuan (The Great Treatise on the Changes). The Zhouyi takes a position of opposition to Heaven-only rule ("the arrogant dragon will have reasons to repent") as expressed in the first hexagram, far from a worshipping attitude. Interpreting Heaven as the ideal and "return" as the return of yang is perhaps Confucian, you do find many of his pyramid-scheme ideas in many commentaries, but they are not the original ideas of the I Ching's authors. Da Yi Sheng Shui (like the original circular I Ching and all things taoist proper) follows Fuxi's arrangement of the eight trigrams derived from Hetu and Luoshu. The oldest "seed" texts of taoism are not texts -- they are diagrams. Interpretations of the diagrams via added words is human; the diagrams, however, are divine. The Xiantian diagram you've posted seems to be commented on by someone addressing (or trying to figure out, rather) why it couldn't stay put. "The lower height of west and north" means Northwest, the hexagram Zhen, associated with Spring and thunder and the first impulse of motion within the stillness of Xiantian. "Acts powerful" refers to this impulse. The text you posted explains Xiantian-to-Houtian transformation which rearranges the perfect balance of the eight primal trigrams and sets the manifest world in motion. "Return" is a two-way road in taoism, you don't "return to Heaven," rather, Pre-heaven returns to Post-heaven and Post-heaven returns to Pre-heaven. "To and fro goes the Way." King Wen and the Duke of Zhou were very aware of this dynamic process.

Thank you, Lienshan. Here's a sample of what the Eranos I Ching (Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Augusto Sabbadini) does: 24 Return -- Fu The situation described by this hexagram is characterized by the re-emergence of something past, returning to a previous time or place or retracing a path in order to correct one's mistakes. Image of the situation Return. Growing. Emerging, entering, without affliction. Partners come, without fault. Reversing: returning (to) one's dao. (The) seventh day comes return. Harvesting: possessing directed going. Fields of meaning: Return, FU: go back, turn or lead back; recur, reappear, come again; restore, renew, recover; return to an earlier time or place. Ideogram: step and retrace a path. Grow, HENG: heavenly influence pervading and nourishing all things; prosper, succeed, expand, develop; effective, favorable; quality of summer and South, second stage of the Time Cycle. With pronunciation XIANG: offer a sacrifice; offer a gift to a superior; accept, enjoy. And so on for each word... then come Patterns of Wisdom (words in brackets absent from the original text, added by translators very tentatively, different in fonts to make sure the reader does not mistake the stylistic organization toward a sentence that is easier on the uppermost crust of one's neocortex for the real thing -- the real thing, in the meantime, is processed a level below, at least, and on several levels of meaning simultaneously... They say interpreting the images of the I Ching is like interpreting dreams -- complete certainty is laughable, but getting the drift of a dream is an innate skill all undamaged humans either have or can learn.) Thunder Located (in the) earth('s) center. Return. (The) earlier kings used culminating sun (to) bar (the) passages. Bargaining sojourners (used culminating sun) not (to) move. (The) crown prince (used culminating sun) not (to) inspect (on all) sides. with the following Field of Meanings for the "earlier kings": XIAN WANG: ideal rulers of old; the golden age, primal time; mythical sages in harmony with nature and with one of the meanings of "bargain" being "hour before sunrise and sunset." This is one of the delicious hidden double-talk inner metaphors of the I Ching (little by little you start discerning them with practice... and suspecting there's thousands -- maybe millions -- maybe billions! and there's triple-talk and quadruple-talk ones there too... perhaps trillions?..). So, if we take "hour before sunrise and sunset" for the second-layer meaning of the double-meaningful "bargaining sojourners," and "harmony with nature" for the "earlier kings," and also notice that "crown prince" may or may not be "crown prince" because the field of meanings includes "empress, mother of a prince..." ...but at this point you have to be dreaming the I Ching dream of time and space and it's really easy to get lost in a dream, as everyone knows, so studying the I Ching is the art of lucid dreaming within its dreams of time and space... then doing something that will affect the waking reality. And I've done it many times but still it sends shivers down my spine every time. (Anyone has a shivering emoticon? )

Oh... sorry it's not coming through everywhere, in fact my version proved glitchy too, I thought it was my computer acting up the day I posted it, but it is consistently glitchy, turns out. Well, Suninmyeyes and Chris D, you can perhaps listen to Syd Barrett the great Pink Floyd patriarch singing Chapter 24 (going verbatim with Wilhelm/Baynes translation, abridged -- thanks for the additional lines, Zerostao!) if you just punch it in youtube search, minus the pictures... I've always thought that Pink Floyd gained some straightforward mass appeal but lost some magic when Syd was gone. They didn't sing the I Ching anymore, in particular... and the eerie otherworldly sound, as elusive as magic always is, was diligently imitated later but never again came from the upper dantien. I wanted to open the new forum with this east-meets-west song because... well, because change is return and return is success, just as Marblehead pointed out.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well. The crucial difference between taijiquan and any hard MA or any athletic activity for that matter is that the skill in the latter reaches a peak very early in life and it's downhill from there. A tennis player is considered old at 30, a gymnast, at 20. A professional boxer gets sick later in life -- every single one of them. A ballerina retires at 35. No matter how long and how hard they work at becoming highly skilled, there's a ceiling they hit very early and then the best they can do is linger there for a few more years, gradually (or abruptly) sliding down in skill, in the health of the body, and from what I've seen, let's not even mention the state of the mind that comes with the "has-been" status which can't be remedied by any amount of hard work and dedication. With taijiquan it's the opposite! You can start at any age and as long as you keep investing hard work and dedication, your skill grows. This creates a totally different mindset of expectations, a very healthy one -- practitioners are not mourning a loss of this and that, not fighting a losing battle against entropy -- instead, they are celebrating steady growth, their lives are not about decline, their future is not about losing everything they once worked so hard to gain. Kicking or not kicking anyone's ass while at it is very peripheral, but kick ass they can, and also can be sure that if they can't today but keep working on it, ten years down the road their chances will be better rather than worse -- which is not true for Mohammed Ali et al.

I think that's great. Emotional (sic), even passionate contacts with all creatures are humanizing to us, and their absence, dehumanizing... regardless of how they react to our emotions. (Sometimes passionately, I've experienced that.) When no one is watching/listening, I talk to everything. I used to exclude man-made objects, but a couple of episodes convinced me they should be included too. Once I touched a famous monument and introduced myself, as I often do with live stuff. It zapped me with an introduction of its own: "I am pain." But how. On a lighter note, I always call out the name of any everyday object I'm looking for. They always respond -- always. Car keys! Cheese grater! Jade earring from the left ear! They all know their names. Try it and see. Whatever you've misplaced longs to be found -- you just have to let it know you miss it and need it. If you don't care, they don't care to form relationships with you. If you care but don't tell them, they might not know.

Nice... Ogden Nash came up with an alternative opening in 1933: I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

Myth, have you ever seen your teacher take out a black-belted hard MA dude? I've seen mine do it with one finger, I think I've told the story here. Don't you just love a martial theorist? Coming to taiji from taekwondo, I at least have a personal frame of reference for what a "soft" art can do against a "hard" one. I used to be trained to break boards and shit -- we had an exam every three months, and you had to break one with a punch, one with a kick, a different kind every time. Then you were given the broken boards as a souvenir, I had a collection stacked up in my garage, I was so proud of myself. To think what Snake Creeping in the Grass alone can do with all those high kicks... To see what the body of bricks and cement blocks experiences when meeting the body of flexible steel wrapped in cotton and silk... ...delicious.