Taomeow

In the Amazon, many native tribes used poison arrows, and every medicine man or woman studied poisons and antidotes. Toward this end, he or she asked questions. The questions were asked of the people in the know, the spirits, and natural phenomena. They were asked in a logical, analytical waking state and in a trance and in dreams. They were asked by talking to the elders and by studying the ways of the animals and by taking a brew of "teacher plants" and "doctor plants," they were asked of the seasons and of the travelers familiar with other tribes' ways -- they were asked incessantly and then all information thus obtained was integrated into a picture of reality -- this world and everything it contains and the Beyond and everything it contains -- as comprehensive as possible. Failing to ask these questions meant losing the license to practice medicine, so to speak, because the shaman not equipped to understand wasn't equipped to heal. So in the situation your parable describes, the questions he or she would ask would not be meaningless as they were to the buddhist doctor -- but meaningful for to find the right antidote. So "who made this arrow," e.g., was asked to determine which poison was used -- and therefore the answer was, e.g., "the Bakairi," and the shaman would go, "aha, so if it is an arrow made by the Bakairi, they use the poison curare, so we'll treat it with this antidote before removing the arrow, otherwise the patient won't survive the procedure" -- and produce it from his or her carefully prepared medical supplies. Or the answer would be "this is a Yanomame arrow," and the shaman would say, "oh, OK, the Yanomame don't use poison on arrows shot from a bow, only on blow darts, so we can remove the arrow and treat the wound and not worry about the antidote." Most native peoples of the world had a special word to call their shaman which invariably meant a man or woman of knowledge, one who knows, one who knows the real, one who knows what others don't, one who knows and understands, and so on -- incessant variations of this theme. So, the not-knowing of a buddhist adept elevated to a principle in the story would simply be chalked up to a lack of professionalism by those who know those who know.

Mal, thanks for the picture! -- yes, Growant, that's what it looks like (I forgot the word "slats" but that's what I meant by "planks" ). The plywood I put on top of that allows me to keep the padding to a minimum -- just a mattress top, not a mattress, the thickness of a down comforter. I experimented with more padding -- e.g., by putting an inch-thick yoga mat under the pad and trying it out, and my back said "no, this moves in the direction of defying the purpose! Firm is firm is firm, no tricks, please!" So that's the idea. Mal is doing something else with his, something better than a spring mattress IMO but not quite what I did.

Long ago, far away. It was perfect. I was only 7 or 8 though and didn't even know I had a back. I totally believe it. I had my comfiest sleep on the floor of a tent with a pile of straw stuffed underneath -- or, on occasion, dry clover, so fragrant it transports all your senses to paradise. Sleeping on plants fashioned into a support surface is in a class of its own. One of the problems with spring mattresses, aside from everything else, is energetic -- you sleep on Metal overexposing yourself to the Metal phase of qi, effectively. (If the bed frame is also metal, you get more of that.) Metal "contracts" -- which is why you get tensions and cramps and stiffness from its qi upon overexposrue (unless your wuxing situation is that of Metal deficiency, in which case it is a non-issue, but I hardly ever see any charts with Metal deficiency, and quite a lot with excess -- this is the nature of the time. Generally, we are overexposed to Metal as a society.)

On a revolution. It all started last summer in China. I was surprised and even shocked by the hardness of the mattress in the apartment our friends found for us there, in an ordinary middle-class neighborhood (Chinese middle class living accommodations differ from American or European ones quite significantly in terms of "modern conveniences," but look increasingly similar in terms of furniture). I have always chosen the firmest mattress I could find, but the Chinese one was way firmer, and in a couple of days, when I got used to it, I realized it was the most comfortable ever. Then at one point a local massage therapist told me, "you should sleep on a firmer surface." When I came back home, I came to hate my mattress. The feeling was, distinctly, of qi leaking out of my lower back, leached out by the sagging surface. So I started shopping for a new one, a really firm one like the one in China. I looked everywhere and tried everything, and finally was told by a retailer of supposedly the firmest (and priced like a luxury car, almost) mattresses that were still too saggy that I would not find anything firmer in this country because it simply does not exist. This is it. So then I started designing a perfect bed in my lower back's mind. Sleeping on the floor was the idea turned down for feng shui considerations (it is thought of as conductive to an unconscious sense of being unprotected in FS, and therefore discouraged). I tried European platform beds, imagining a solid board for the foundation, but couldn't find one -- all the ones I saw had planks OR were priced like a luxury car. So I finally had a thick plywood board cut to size at Home Depot and installed it on my planked futon frame ($40 with delivery), and put a down mattress topper on top ($80 at Target), and started sleeping on that. The first couple of nights my muscles complained -- not used to the hardness -- but the bones went, "yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" The third night, the muscles didn't complain anymore either, and I started waking up with a feeling of qi having flown IN into my lower back instead of out, of being recharged and realigned and all-around "right." My back feels the same after just sleeping on that board as after an hour of yoga or a stretching routine. So I came to realize that this may explain why Asians, en masse, have better postures than Westerners -- they still seem to be partial to hard sleeping surfaces (one mattress salesmen, when I related the story of my China mattress, tried to sell me something asserting that "all his Asian customers buy this one." Maybe, when they're living in the US -- for there's nothing firmer in existence -- but apparently when there is, they know better.) So then I came to realize, also, that we are placed on sagging mattresses (advertized as the latest orthopedic accomplishment of course) since childhood and most people don't know any better because they have never been exposed to any better for as long as they lived. So then I realized that these soft mattresses may be the single most reliable way for pharmaceutical companies making billions of dollars off painkillers to keep getting their sore-back-related profits (with a cut for chiropractors, back surgeons, etc.), this training of a whole culture to sleep on surfaces that destroy the health of its members' backs on a mass scale. So then I realized that by telling people about this I might start a revolution. But first I wanted to find out if my personal sense of health and qi being leached out of the lower back by a sagging mattress and replenished by a firm sleeping surface resonates with anyone else... hence the poll.

Hi Pu-erh, I'm glad you liked the movie. The message I wanted to convey, and the one I see as the director's main focus, is not immediately obvious. Some critics have read into it an allegory of totalitarian power in society in general. This is how I saw it too. What's going on is power struggles -- the primary set-up being that all power ultimately belongs to the master, the man of the household. Women compete, fighting for crumbs of this power, each doing this not for love -- far from it, there can be no love where the power is one-sided -- but for self-protection, for some survivable security of their position, for a fleeting speck of human warmth, for to chase away monstrous loneliness and meaninglessness of their situation, and for a snippet of free will! A crumb from the master's table... remember, you have to be favored by the husband to have any say in anything, e.g. in order to choose what you can eat -- the favorite of the moment orders that and all other wives and concubines have to eat that rather than what they prefer -- but the favorite is not using her own power either even when having this "choice," it is only as much power of choice as she's handed down by the man, as much as he condescends to dispense -- and none for the rest. Women do not show their best side under these conditions -- on the contrary, they are at their worst. One could say they are horrible women... if one didn't look at the social, economic, family conditions that are dictating their personalities, their behaviors, their convoluted ways of struggling for a modicum of human decency, value, or worth. They will do anything... and anything they do is hopeless. The power is still in the hands of the man. The women may try to manipulate the snippet of fake power he has handed down here and there, but ultimately, everything in their lives is predicated on how he will use the real absolute total power he holds. And he will use it to murder the moment something a woman does falls outside his control. So, what I was hoping at least some folks would see in the movie is the accurate picture of the woman's reality, not just in China of not so long ago but in the world in general that has been dominated by take-no-prisoners extreme, deadly, soul-shattering patriarchy for a few thousand years, the most miserable years in the species' history. I wanted them to understand that any behaviors they happen to see as reprehensible in women today are invariably reactive, and the reaction is to a built-in set-up of powerlessness which has been somewhat reversed only very recently, only very partially, nowhere near completely, and more often than not only symbolically (e.g., out of the 1000 richest people in the US, only 1 (one) is a woman and 999 are men... coincidence?..). And it still is, very much, the sad reality even for the "emancipated" Western women today. A reality so taken for granted as to become invisible to perceptions! -- but if you focus your mind's eye real well you might start noticing... Where's the birth control pill which the man takes (he's the responsible one, right?) which destroys his health rather than hers, in the midst of this emancipation? Where is the testiculogram to screen men for testicular cancer via a squeezing and bruising and irradiating and cancer-provoking procedure to match the mammograms invented by babies who weren't breastfed to punish the breast?.. and they weren't breastfed because mom had to work full time?.. because there's no social acceptance and no social conditions for her mom work actually being valued and rewarded as work, the work of a woman, and therefore she has to do the work of a man, to become an honorary male, in order to make a living and avoid the stigma of "uselessness?" Anyway... I could go on and on and on and on and on and on but I'll spare you... So, basically, that's what I was hoping people would see in the movie as clearly as I did. Trampled femininity which starts out with the man destroying it by ownership and ends up destroying itself.

Did you find out who paid for the study? That's what I always do before I give any "studies" even a fleeting consideration. Most anti-meat "studies" are funded by the soy lobby, e.g.. The ones demonizing "red" meat, by the poultry industry. And so on. ("Red" meat is way healthier, by the way, although the factory-farmed variety is not, be it chicken, beef, or -- gasp -- fish or -- oh horror -- pesticide-laced GM vegetables and fruit.) That Americans don't eat meat in moderation is the continuation of the consume-it-all mindset propagated by the same corporations that tweak with our "what to consume" ideas based on their own competition agendas and nothing else. This or that bogeyman item of consumption usually fails closer scrutiny. Innuits consumed a diet of 85% meat and animal fat before the advent of white civilization, and were one of the healthiest populations on earth living in the harshest conditions on earth. On the opposite climatic extreme, the same ratios were consumed by, e.g., the Masai tribe in Africa, considered by some anthropologists not only one of the healthiest but the most beautiful people on earth. Don't look to "studies" for what to eat, they don't produce any honest ones anymore. The "scientist" will lose the grant if the results of the study predetermined by whoever pays for it should clash with the paying party's profits considerations. Look to the history of our species, find out what we ate before food went corporate, take it from there.

Ah well... people will always have regrets, and someone who didn't have the 5 selected by the nurse would probably regret something else... besides, the nurse may have selected, consciously or not, what SHE regrets -- who knows which regrets she didn't relate to she ignored and didn't include?.. I can very well imagine a different scenario... don't we all wish for a "control group of me" to test a different life on?.. So maybe 1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me would, for someone who actually did, as many actually do, turn into an altogether different kind of regret: 1. I wish I'd been less selfish and did more for others, not just for myself -- so I wouldn't be alone all my life and especially now, and didn't feel like such a useless self-centered jerk and didn't despise myself. 2. I wish I didn't work so hard. This could turn into 2. I wish I worked harder on what matters and didn't work at all on things like updating my car to keep up with the Johnses, or maintaining a sterile toilet bowl and then paying the manicurist to work on my cuticles. 3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings may become 3. I wish I had feelings strong enough to give me courage to do the right thing, instead of living a cowardly life, never feeling strong enough about anything to make a difference. 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends may turn into 4. I wish I had found new friends when me and my old friends had grown so different that we fell away from each other naturally. I have nothing in common now with Tom who has become a conceited prick incessantly boasting about his stupid career, his money, and his assorted trophies, nor with Mary whose current interests all congregate around her bottle of booze. Why didn't I seek out people with whom I have common interests, and mutual respect and warmth, and whom I could trust, for new friends? People who would be more like who I am today, instead of alien to me and only considered friends because I happened to go to school with them or lived next door or with whom I could "do things together" as long as those "things" provided distractions to dissipate boredom and a sense of meaninglessness of our relationship?.. And finally, 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier may go along the lines of what Confucius, who was, by all accounts, happy enough, regretted on his deathbed: 5. I wish I had another 50 years to dedicate to the study of the I Ching.

Thank you, Steve F and Seth Ananda. I'll certainly check out the other movie. Vortex, I didn't find the kind of numb, flattened emotionality, creative impotence, or flaccid humanism in the movie that would even remotely match the way you perceived it. No silicon-stuffed chests either, or soft pornish infatuations. Perhaps we've seen different movies after all?..

The more powerful one is the one you can't do without.

Please forgive my sloppiness in failing to provide a link, and thank you so much for noticing that post before I moved it! it's post #22 at http://www.thetaobum...um/page__st__16 and if the link fails, it can be found at Taomeow's personal practice forum in the thread titled "Odds and ends from the main forum" -- post #22 (It's a recent idea of mine, to move my posts instead of deleting them as I used to do when I would respond fast and spontaneously to something on the board and then realize that I've voiced a "controversial" or "highly idiosyncratic" opinion and would have to spend more time on it should someone find therein a point of interest or a bone to pick, or want more info or where I'm coming from etc., and then it would dawn on me that I did only have some time for a spontaneous entry but won't have the time to follow up. So that's when I used to delete my posts, but then, recently, decided to try saving them elsewhere instead, in case someone gets interested and I do have some time in the future to get back to that topic. So, just like this thread, it's all about time!)

Nice to meet another aficionado! I also tried all the methods you've mentioned, and in addition, the sandbox (my favorite) and, er, coffee enemas! Never roasted my own, but used to have it roasted to my specs at a coffee place in LA that offered the service. Don't know if they're still in business. To get the acidity right, I mix 80% arabicas with 20% hararis. Hararis are the ones that tend to be acidic, I don't use them straight up. I don't use methods that don't produce foam (just naturally, no gimmics with stirring and whipping!) I was told by my coffee guru that foam is the face of coffee, and if it has no foam, it has "lost face," funny that this concept so important to the Chinese is extended to coffee where coffee is important. So... no faceless coffee for me unless I'm rushed. That's one reason I don't need cream -- I do like the "oily" feel to coffee, but good foam provides just that. If I drink coffee made by someone not trained in the tradition (some of my family members and friends are), I might add cream to counteract the almost invariable bitterness of amateur coffee. I will also do that if I'm dealing with a dark roast, with few exceptions. Here's what they used to know in the US two hundred years ago (quoting from some book on US history): "Coffee has to be black and hot and sweet like a night of passion, and strong enough to walk on its own."

Devastation near! Grab your Red Suitcase! Run! Run!! Left, right, up, down... duck!!!

Thanks, Thelerner! So now that it's a thread, I continue with a book recommendation: The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer While I vehemently object to the sleight-of-hand (or rather sleight-of-tongue) uses of the word "drug" to describe anything created by mother nature rather than by lab rats in white coats, it's a separate topic altogether so I won't go into that -- but aside from the title which is the unfortunate victim of modern mind manipulation via linguistic tricks and black magic spells, the book is a very fun read, has dozens of pages of scientific references to research that pretty much disproves all mainstream myths about the "evils" of coffee, while the book itself sheds some light on the origins of both this wonderful herbal decoction (that's what it really is, not "drug" until you extract pharmaceutical grade caffeine out of it and use it separately from the plant -- that's a "drug," coffee is an "herb" in the classic sense of "culinary/medicinal plant") and of the myths surrounding it for centuries. I've been not only drinking but researching coffee (traditionally brewed) throughout my adult life, and call it "my liquid brain" -- one of the effects of long-term consumption is consistently higher intellectual ability in drinkers vs non-drinkers of coffee, another one is preserving whatever intellectual ability you have at the age of peak performance into your ripe old age -- among other things, coffee stimulates, preserves, and protects the areas of the brain specifically in charge of higher cognitive functions, and is an antidote to growing progressively rigid (mentally and physically) and all-around stupid as you grow old, and an aid to growing wiser as you grow older. (There's no "drug" that can do that.) There's lots more to the coffee story though. It's a story of a friend, not a foe... The best of friends have some quirks and no one is perfect, but you don't abandon them based on rumors and gossip... and that's what coffee has been getting from mass disinformation sources... for reasons that are rather fun to explore and understand.

I'll bite. What is the soultion considering technology? Same as to everything else. Consciousness. Technology is the antithesis of consciousness. I like the gnostic perspective: there is the creatress, Gaia-Sophia (very close to what taoists call tao, from the descriptions), and everything alive has sprung from her and has memory all the way to the beginning of creation because, well, it's "been there, was it" when it happened and still is part of it and is therefore god- and goddess-like, eternal and magnificent. And because of this embedded memory traceable all the way to the origins, every creation thus created has consciousness, knowledge of self. "Know thyself," which being conscious really boils down to, is available to every being that has these natural origins -- but not to any technological creation because technological artifacts don't have this memory of arising with life itself, and therefore no true organic knowledge of self, and therefore no consciousness, and because of this fatal flaw of disconnection from the source and therefore from self and therefore from consciousness, can never develop it, ever, no matter how skillfully they can imitate it on some advanced AI level or other. They can't have the knowledge of the core of creation, existence, being, because that's not where they come from. Where DO they come from? The gnostics believed it was an unfortunate accident that gave rise to semi-synthetic entities, the archons... I don't know all the details (still reading up on that) but our world looks like a classic archon design, self-replicating an obsession with technology (by the law of self-similarity, resonance, ganying -- a semi-synthetic being will want to have more of the same, these are its preferred resonating media) and taking it ever farther, and now into the very bodies of plants and animals and humans (designer molecules to inhale, ingest, drink up, get treated with, get high on, get inoculated with, slap onto the skin, attach with a patch, on and on and on, by the hundreds of thousands of new kinds every year, and now also the microchips and nano-controllers and mind manipulation technology and augmentation/transhumanism movement, all that horrible undead jazz...) and not just the bodies, it's the very souls they seek to modify to be like them more and more -- turning it all a bit then some more then a lot then entirely artificial, replacing conscious beings with robots. To become aware of this is the first step toward tackling the "solution considering technology." To find a solution, one must first become conscious of the problem... What have you done so far on the personal level? I more or less do something about it on a personal level every day, it would be hard to list everything, so just randomly off the top of my head... Quit a job in oil and gas industries. Don't own a single thread of clothes that's synthetic. Don't use anything "disposable" if I can help it. Cook from scratch, no chemical additives in foods I serve and consume. Was the last person to get a cell phone on the face of the earth, and only did so because family members forced me to so as to be able to keep in touch the way technology has trained them to so fast -- a cell phone a must. Don't have cable, don't watch TV (internet and youtube are in because communities are out -- e-media of communication is a technological replacement for the real ongoing tribal, communal, kin-based, common life-based communication. Some communication is better than no communication, but every time I talk to you, the generic you, on the internet, I am acutely aware that technology has made it impossible to go talk to my tribe, community, kin, common life-sharing neighbors instead -- as often and as easily as I do it on the internet -- for this is not the kind of neighbors it breeds... and therefore I can swap ideas with your mind but not pour you a cup of coffee, place a warm hand on your shoulder and say "it's going to be all right" and get you to hear the heartbeat in the words, see the twinkle in the eyes, smell the tamales I'm cooking while we're talking, notice they're whetting your appetite, invite you to share them with me...) Don't drive where I can get on foot. (Not many such places in CA, but I look for them.) Do study the old pre-technological ways (anything that does not involve using anything other than your own body to make is not technology in my book, it's art, craft, skill -- it's human, not archon). Have never harmed a plant, animal, or human I wasn't going to eat.

I know the difference between labor and labor, been there done both. What I meant was, a malnourished, overworked, socially and economically stunted, physically and emotionally abused mother severed from the natural tradition of caring for her own and her baby's body is not suffering in labor because of a lack of technology, nor is her baby dying because of a lack of technology. They are suffering and dying because they are in an unnatural, inhuman situation, brought about by the same forces that bring about technology. As for the magnitude of the deforestation problem and the agricultural "blessings" that supposedly make up for it with a vengeance, I suggest you guys read up on some non-propaganda books by non-sell-out non-brainwashed researchers who do their homework instead of repeating what they were told by other repeaters to repeat. One recommendation that comes to mind is Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization Richard Manning

You are offered propaganda, not facts, when you are told these things. Yes, compared to 200 years ago when labor laws were nonexistent, we are better off. Not because of technology, but because in some countries it is now illegal to work people to death. However, if the powerful so desire and nothing is stopping them, they can and do work people to death WITH technology. E.g., in China, Microsoft and IBM have workers at their facilities sign a clause in the contract that forbids committing suicide (or the family will be penalized). That's because it's a real big problem -- people creating superior, advanced, wonderfully life-improving technology are hired to work a 120-hour work week and are driven to suicide by sheer exhaustion in vast enough numbers to make this a concern for the bosses -- hence the clause in the contract. A hunter-gatherer worked an average of 18 hours a week -- it was enough. (I'm not making this up, it's an established anthropological fact.) And what work it was!!! I've done this work on kayaking trips in the wilderness when we would live off the forest and the river for a month at a time, "working" at gathering berries and mushrooms and fishing and crawdadding... oh, ever so hard... and, wait, I had to sleep on a bed of piled-up dry clover, so fragrant that I would sometimes put in 18 hours of sleep, just because it was so good that you felt how good it was while you were asleep, and willed yourself to sleep some more... and, well, yes, I had to swing an ax to chop down a few dry branches for the fire if I couldn't find enough on the ground... and, well, yes, I did have to dig out the wild garlic and gather sorrel for the soup... and the wild strawberries and bilberries had me practically crawl on my hands and knees for hours because my jaws couldn't stop working... soooo hard... the best memories of my life. What you hear about "child mortality" is the outcome of malnourished, overworked poor living in inhuman conditions due to -- what, lack of technology? Or maybe lack of access to, e.g., pristine unmolested forests that would feed them -- ever heard about the death penalty for shooting the lord's deer in the lord's woods?.. no wait, for the deer they would hang the whole family, individual death penalty was for the lord's quail... Sheesh... And now that the lord has showered us with technology, we kneel and praise him. Well, I don't fuckin' (sorry Strawdog65) kneel before the archons. I kneel before a wild strawberry. Lords of technology are a dime a dozen, but wild strawberries -- THAT they have pretty much gotten rid of by now... along with millions of other miracles and wonders. The internet helped fix your liver condition? I'm glad to hear that, please stay healthy. But are you sure technology wasn't the CAUSE of your liver condition? It often is... more often than not... ever heard the expression "modern disease?" What do you think it means?..

Sure. Here's one of the most extreme examples I've encountered of a clash between Free Whim and Free Will which the I Ching stepped in to point out. When it is extreme, she may seem to make no sense in her response to your question, because there's a bigger question you need to be asking at the moment and she will ignore the "whimsical" one and answer the real one instead, the one you didn't know you needed to ask because you weren't attuned to the flow of time, space, and energy of the moment. The question was whether a rock band ISO more visibility and success would benefit from changing its name. The answer was, "there's illness; one does not die." It made no sense until two weeks later, when the lead guitarist was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. All Free Will there was went into deciding, time and time again, on the best treatment/healing strategies, and remained invested into that for a very long time. In the meantime, the band fell apart, and not only the original whimsical question about changing its name didn't matter, but its very existence didn't matter anymore. It existed due to Free Whim, which is oblivious of the true imperatives of the moment -- and these will demand an investment of Free Will because true imperatives of the moment run close to the core of existence -- at all times. When you know what they are, that's your field of application of your Free Will, and operating within that field will invariably cause Free Whim to fall away. When you don't know what they are, you handle every decision you make or refuse to make with Free Whim, and in this case Free Will plays no part in your life. On a more mundane level, I have seen responses to divinations along the lines of "superior and inferior" choices -- meaning, e.g., that I could do what I was planning to do and it would indeed benefit the "inferior" aspects of my being but be detrimental to the "superior" aspects. So, e.g., avoiding a difficult task would be short-term advantageous and long-term stifling to my development. Or vice versa -- seeking to accomplish a difficult practical task would inconvenience my "superior" self (because, e.g., cultivation has to be put on hold) but place my "inferior" self in a more comfortable position. The I Ching doesn't tell me which course is "right" or "wrong" -- she shows me the field of applications for my Free Will, "you decide," so to speak. But she does show me the field of application of Free Will, not Free Whim. If the question is free-whimsical and there's no field of application for Free Will, she usually tells me something along the lines of "it doesn't really matter" or "use your own brain" or even "don't bother me with this again, I already told you before." The "size" of the question is not what matters -- it can be very "small" -- I might consult her about highlighting my hair and she will detail the pro's and con's, giving me the "Adornment" chapter, e.g., there's nothing wrong with external yang applications, in the form of some peroxide, and she may support that if she likes the color she sees in her mind's eye. No, what matters is the "substance" of the question, its alignment with the "landscape of time" or, alternatively, the questioning (or non-questioning) party's failure to even notice it... She makes you notice it and start learning how to keep noticing it and paying attention to what it's like and charting your course accordingly, whether baby steps or huge leaps, everything. So that's how she teaches you... the understanding comes very gradually, and only with much practice, and only with divination practice and comparing your divination results with real-life events that unfold as you go -- and not with any "I Ching of the head" undertakings, not any "studies" that don't involve your very own real life. These are useless, IMO.

Wasabi noodles! Bring your bowls, your chopsticks, and your Geiger counters

Just like a pancake, the sun sizzles in the sky... I'm getting hungry...

I've been living with the I Ching for some ten years, so I'll try to answer your questions. So, those who understand this book...what is your motivation for using it and studying it (besides divination)? I believe she knows what I don't know and would like to know. E.g., who I am, where I come from, where I'm going... stuff like that. Also, she is the voice of my Free Will. Too often people hear the voice of their Free Whim instead, which is really the voice of the demons-in-charge, assorted internalized controlling forces that bind them so skillfully that they don't realize someone or something foreign to their true nature is what's pulling the strings of action or non-action for them. They think it's their own decisions they are making... when in fact it's the deceitful Free Whim (free for the controlling forces, not for the controlled party!) that causes them to move or not move. A puppet on a string is free to move whimsically this way and that way... or at least that's what it thinks for as long as it's unaware of the strings... and, see, it's made just so as to mistake the internalized voices of its controlling demonic masters for the voice of its own Free Will. The I Ching teaches you to tell the difference. How has it helped you personally? In these ten years, I had to face major adversities of the kind I never had to face before, and many people I used to trust and rely on disappointed me and ultimately proved to me that in your darkest hour you are alone -- no one has the guts to go to hell with you and be there for you, much less the know-how as to how to get you out of there, much less the energy, wisdom, presence, constancy, trust to be your stronger, wiser alter ego. When you need to move mountains not because you are particularly ambitious but because a few have fallen on your head... well, that's when you may find you have nobody and nothing but yourself to accomplish the task... nobody and nothing strong enough to help... except for the I Ching. She was there for me. She's got what it takes. Do you think that it is accurate in terms of understanding patterns and powers in nature? One hundred percent. Does the knowledge carry over to other Taoist practices in a substantial way? I don't believe any other taoist practices are possible to grasp without it. Whole schools and sects have made the mistake of ignoring it and latching onto something "new and cool" instead (e.g. an imported belief system that came into vogue for a few hundred years, or even a couple thousand), and they didn't last. "It flares up, dies down, is thrown away," as the I Ching herself describes these. The I Ching has staying power. Its opponents and non-proponents don't. Why should one learn this book? There's no "should." The best way to find out is ask her.

Thank you for the lesson, grandmaster ChiDragon. From now on I'll do my best to not let what one of the Four Tigers of Chen has taught me fool me anymore.

Um... this is not "tai chi qigong." It's Chen Laojia Erlu, aka Pao Chui -- Cannon Fist. It is the second of the two original Chen taiji forms. You may have to practice it to believe it, but it does not use "muscle contractions and deep breathing." It uses peng and fajin.

I have The Teachings of Immortals Chung and Lu translated by Eva Wong, which is where I came across this passage: "Lu asked: 'How do people become ghost immortals? What kind of methods did they practice when they were alive?' Chung said: 'People become ghost immortals when they try to cultivate but do not understand the Tao. Wanting to make fast progress, they take shortcuts in their training. As a result, their bodies are as brittle as dry wood and their minds are as dead as cold ashes. Hoping to keep the spirit within, they hold on to their intention. Thus, when they enter stillness, only the yin spirit is liberated. As a result, they become ghosts with no spirit; they cannot become immortals of pure yang. Because the yin spirit does not dissipate after they die, they are called ghost immortals. Although these beings are classed as immortals, they are really ghosts with no substance. Practitioners who claim to be Buddhist and who practice incorrectly the techniques of quiet sitting usually end up as this type of immortal.' " And so on -- he explains several more classes of immortals, to wit, human immortals, earth immortals, spirit immortals, and celestial immortals, and practices that lead to each state. Shamanic practices are not mentioned specifically at all, but my own comparative studies lead me to believe that there's different classes of shamans and there is some overlapping that might correspond to human, earth, spirit, or celestial immortals, with earth immortals being perhaps the most prevalent class of beings among the fully traditional (not bogus and not pop) shamans. It is very common for a shaman to transmit his or her spirit to the successor in its entirety -- either a family member selected for the path or a trained apprentice. Thus, some shamans not only have full choice in the matter of reincarnating their spirit or not, but deliberately control where it will go after the body dies. That's the skill of an "immortal with substance," not a ghost immortal. For a lively example of a modern day Siberian shaman transferring his spirit to his chosen successor upon his death, read "Entering the Circle," a book by a Russian psychiatrist working at a psychiatric hospital in Siberia at the time, who ran across this peculiar case in her practice. (An old shaman from a remote village decided to die and transfer his spirit to his nephew. The young man had no prior exposure to anything of this nature, being a very ordinary city guy, and at first became convinced that he was going crazy, which is why he consulted the psychiatrist. Only when the spirit of the shaman uncle takes root and explains to him exactly what happened and all the why's and wherefore's, the young man becomes, um, instantly enlightened, and proceeds to explain to the psychiatrist that he IS that same shaman now -- with full sanity and full ability at that. It's a fun read, and pretty accurate as to how these things can unfold today.)