Taomeow

Um, can't be a mirage. The root of the word is the same as in "mirror" -- a mirage appears where there's a lot of flat open space (e.g. a desert) due to mirror-like reflections in tiny water particles that can reflect the image to other particles and carry it over distances this way -- under some rare conditions, unbroken and large-scale. In a city, such a mirror would be instantly shattered because there's a lot of stuff there to interfere, so large-scale natural mirages in urban settings are an impossibility. Now as to what it can be -- um... Blue Beam technology is the most likely explanation far as I'm concerned. Scary. Then of course, if you put Occam's razor aside, it can be a taoist master fooling around making images (they do have the skill, but I don't think they use it for shits and giggles), or if you ever watched Fringe the TV series, it can be the beginning of the end of the world caused by a breech of separation between our universe and a parallel one. Take your pick...

Originally it is the yang part of the yin-yang unity, yang is thought of as positive and yin as negative. Has to do with many things (aside from the classical "sunny side of the hill" and "shady side of the hill") -- e.g., human anatomy, so arranged that "something crucial for the survival of the species sticking out" in a male corresponds to "nothing crucial for the survival of the species sticking out" in a female. Which is why "something" is interpreted as "positive," i.e. "right there, sticking out," whereas "no such thing, nothing sticking out" equals "negative." So far so good, "positive" is not "better" than "negative," just "opposite," but not "opposite" as an "enemy in opposition," more like a clear case of "opposites attract," like oppositely charged ends of magnets, let's call one of them "plus" or "positive" and the other one "minus" or "negative." Let's call the presence of light yang, "positive," and its opposite, absence of light (darkness), "shady side of the hill," yin, "negative." So far so good. Still no attacks on the negative, yin, female principle, just noticing that it's "opposite" to yang and that existence and awareness can only be the outcome of both interacting continuously. If there's no "darkness," there can be no "light." Positive and negative depend on each other. So far so good. Then things went very wrong for humanity and a whole civilization (Indo-European, and then most of the rest which it either destroyed or hijacked) was arranged around the idea that "positive," i.e. male, means "good," and "negative," i.e. female, means "bad." Which is why today, a few thousand years of brainwashing later, you come across scores of gurus and practices that have grown out of this fucked up idea, most of them unbeknownst to them. Few of their disciples seem to know that if you come across a practice that is supposed to get you to some "pure yang," "pure spirit," some victory of any which "positive principle" over its opposite in any shape or form, the correct response is, RUN. So instead, folks embrace these goodies, because, well, they are sons and daughters of many generations of duped humans taught to think of "positive" as "good" or in any event "better" than "negative." The whole civilization spins around "something's got to be sticking out everywhere," nothing is left alone in its "nothing sticking out" state -- we build pyramids, rockets, transmission towers, skyscrapers, oil rigs, nuclear plants... "positive" stuff. And then some folks go "spiritual" in ways that are about this "positive principle" all over again -- without noticing that they are still doing the same thing as everybody else in our "positive" set up, only now in the la-la land of, um, spiritual practices. These practices lead to... well, I don't know where they lead, but it can't be anything "real," because reality can only tolerate idiocy as a local and temporal phenomenon, not as an eternal state of affairs. Hope this helps.

Yup... There's several efficient ways to upset the overall electrolytic balance in a population reliant on food supply that is controlled by anything other than nutritional experience of thousands of years: 1. Use either excess or deficiency of either sodium or potassium in everyday dietary choices available to an average consumer; 2. Make it illegal to obtain either one or the other in therapeutically significant amounts and in the form of bioavailable nontoxic compounds; 3. Offer toxic additives (e.g. "anticaking agents" in commonly available table salt) or toxic compounds (e.g. "potassium chloride" in supplements, in amounts so restricted -- 99 mg cut-off for potassium -- that the dose of the "good guy" is too low to be efficient while the dose of the piggybacking "bad guy" is too low to notice its detrimental effects immediately); 4. Disseminate a lot of disinformation -- e.g., pretend that "all" potassium compounds behave in the body the same way as the toxic chloride and are all equally dangerous; pretend that "high salt intake" is the same thing as "high intake of salt mixed with toxic additives, or processed in ways that eliminate synergistic trace minerals and drastically interfere with its bioavailability, turning it into junk clogging the kidneys instead of what it would have been in its natural bioavailable state;" and so on -- sky is the limit, confused minds the goal, sick bodies the outcome, medical cartel's unparalleled and unprecedented profits the "inadvertent side effect," if one believes in such things. In our society, they went with using excess sodium, deficient/illegalized potassium. In the past, they used the opposite too -- historically there were many laws regulating, restricting, or prohibiting the use of salt by the common folks, and many lies about its effects justified first "spiritually" and later "scientifically."

Shamanic uses of ayahuasca also involve a saltless, vegetarian, potassium-rich diet. I wonder how Mr. Luk would fare if he had a chance to go as far with the positive principle as it takes you... could have been fun. Empirically, a saltless, vegetarian, predominantly raw, potassium-rich diet, which I tried for a prolonged period of time in the heyday of my nutritional experimentation, causes this pattern of the positive principle to unfold: /\ . Which goes along with the general taoist principle -- extreme yang flips over into yin. Which is one reason I take any and all spiritual endeavors ISO the positive principle with a pinch of salt.

I brought one of these all the way from China -- wooden, made out of a crooked branch of a tree left in its natural state, only sealed with clear polish right over the bark. I love it, although I feel silly for not having invented and made it.

Ever had a vaccine of any kind injected into the left arm or under the left shoulder blade?

A biophysicist, Dr. Gilbert Ning LIng, published a book in 1962 titled A Physical Theory of the Living State, the Association-Induction Hypothesis, which I read to the extent I could understand it (maybe 10%) and have regarded as my cellular energy bible ever since. Dr. Ling proposed an alternative explanation to that generally accepted by biochemists, because in his own experiments the generally accepted theory (which, if you study its history, is not even a theory, just a scenario randomly proposed for its plausibility and accepted as "scientific fact" without a trace of any scientific proof behind it, and is held together to this day by the force of authority of an assertion repeated so many times that repeating it has successfully substituted proving it -- which is, sadly, the case with most of our "scientific facts" pertaining to live processes) -- as I was saying, the generally accepted theory failed to match his experimental data AND to be self-congruent too. Here's, briefly, his Association–Induction (A-I) Hypothesis: each cell wall is structured; cell cations (the positively-charged ions) are associated mostly with macromolecules (the large molecules) potassium in cells gathers at negatively charged association sites along the macromolecules of proteins and lipids ( fat or fat-like substances) once the potassium ions are in place, a force of attraction causes water molecules to line up their oxygen atoms facing one direction and their hydrogen atoms facing the other (around the protein/lipid macromolecules). This produces a layer of structured water. This means the water molecules are no longer free or random but exhibit an orderly arrangement as in ice crystals – although cellular structured water is much less solid than ice; around the initial layer of highly structured water molecules is a second layer, which is less structured because it is farther from the attractive force. The third layer is less structured than the second and so on. Water molecules most distant from the macromolecules are most random though probably somewhat structured; The protein/lipid macromolecules are interwoven in a latticework that extends throughout the cell to form a skeleton-like structure resembling a sponge. This skeleton itself controls ion concentrations by choosing potassium in preference to other ions and by structuring water; Water that is structured will not readily accept ions or foreign materials. Although much sodium-laden extracellular serum diffuses through the cell and ions are exchanged between the cell and serum, no energy is required in the form of ATP to maintain high cellular levels of potassium and other ions. In theory the cell could hold these high concentrations forever without using energy. Only when cells are damaged by trauma or poison do they require energy from ATP. This, to me, means that qi is indeed what I've long maintained it is -- a pattern and a pattern recognition mechanism -- and offers scientific substantiation to my assertion repeated more times than I care to remember -- "qi is not energy." Not ANY kind of energy. It's something altogether else.

Most of all I would like to know why you wrote it as though it happened to you, Leon. When I was little, I used to imagine having survived some horrible accidents. I thought I'd fallen out of the sky -- and, because there was no history of that to my then-knowledge of my life, I had to justify the out-of-nowhere memory of the fall by creating a story around the feeling. I would introduce a plane, a crash, a this and that... a plot that would seem humanly possible. Or another one, about having been bitten by a poisonous snake. Again, no history of that, but a distinct memory none the less -- so I would devise a plot about some terrarium whence the snake escaped, and so on. By now I know that these are indeed memories -- not of the actual events which, verbatim, never happened in this life -- more like archetypal... also symbolic of things that did happen in this life, because archetypal memories are memories of NOW, not just "back then." They are current for as long as you can't remember what actually happened -- precise memory is their undoing, while symbols, thought-constructs, ideas, images, any "possible" or "likely" or "feasible" or "believed in" explanations, etc., are their hiding places... Is something similar going on with you? Did you choose the first person narrative because you feel as though something of this nature did happen to you, although you couldn't tell when, where, how?.. ???...

Not to a traditionalist it isn't. Chen Laojia is. Of course a friend/teacher of mine in Beijing grilled me for messing with Chen to begin with. Talk to an entrenched yangster and you'll learn that the Chens are impostors, the form will dislocate your clavicles, and Mao Zedong was the only thing in Chinese history that's worse. Still, one must draw a line somewhere. If you are not a family member, you don't mess with the form. If you are, go ahead, change it, combine Chen with Yang and Wu and call it 99, more power to you, but don't expect anyone who is a student of a lineage whose teachers firmly believed in if it ain't broke don't fix it to surrender theirs without a push-hands. That is, if I was correct in ignoring the translation of the above as "ninja warrior on Valium" which was one of the dictionary's suggestions.

Dear Steve, thanks for trusting my humble. Sure... please stay tuned (gotta be elsewhere for the moment).

*my response moved to my personal practice forum

Not on a street corner. In a hospital. I had major surgery, they were having trouble bringing me back from general anesthesia. My... um, everything but the body... went elsewhere. In this "elsewhere" I met my higher self. When I was done visiting, turned out that in the meantime my body was trying to run away and six people were holding me down and they barely managed to strap me to the bed with leather belts and still couldn't wake me up. I was later told that they had never seen a 17-year-old girl detach the body from the... um, the rest of it... and had no idea the body vacated by the mind, spirit, all that jazz, is so freakin' strong -- six people couldn't cope! Well, I had no memory of what my body was doing at that point (I retrieved it twenty years later though, and this got videotaped by the therapist, by the way, so I know what it looked like... also what it felt like), but I remember every detail of my encounter with my higher self that was simultaneously taking place. Why, is it unusual?

I think along the same lines. "All of them are me..." ...at least if I don't let anyone microchip this "me" (that would be a form of possession -- demonic, I'm pretty sure) and turn into "them." But then, the "whole" me might be big enough to respond, at a point in space-time very far removed yet still connected to the current me, by swallowing up their galaxies and spitting out the pits, thus turning "them" into "me" instead. I dunno either.

Imagine meeting your two-months old self, SZ. He is no less real than you. It's just that he is not ready to read TTB yet. Or the scriptures, for that matter. Does it make him less real than the current you? Nope. I think it's the same deal with the "higher self." Higher, maybe... at least that was my experience meeting her when I had an NDE at the age of 17... physically higher, "up there," just as a fully grown adult is "higher" than the little kid he or she used to be (still is in a different space-time/has always been/will always be) -- i.e. taller... head farther away from the ground. But "more real," nah. Just experiencing a different facet of reality from the one I am experiencing. Higher? Yes... so what?.. More real? What's more real, a soup of particles or a soup du jour?.. Everything is real. It's just that different realities sometimes overlap, sometimes compete, sometimes harmonize and sometimes clash, sometimes support and sometimes deconstruct each other... That's because reality is not unlike you and me... and that's because we are not unlike reality.

Interesting questions! It's not orderly though. The monkey wrench is the Yi of the Yi Jing/I Ching. The "Changes" of the book of changes are not the regular wuxing process, it's the "times that have yi" when it was written, and it's the "times that have yi" it has been written for. Yi is not wuxing. It is "emergency." It is "irregularity." It is "intervention." As for "the real you," the taoist view would be, concern yourself with what you know, try to learn what you don't, adjust accordingly, and don't worry about the "big metaphysics" of it all until it becomes tangibly, practically useful to you and/or others. You are the real you. While being the real you in this-here life, knowing the wuxing layout of your current life makes you more conscious of some of the deeper aspects of the real you than not knowing it. Discovering the current imbalances and consciously doing (or choosing not to do) things to bring your whole current self closer to balance is where free will would come in consciously. Free will is consciousness by another name. The more of the latter, the more of the former. There's limits though. Traditional Chinese astrology asserts it's about 40-40-20: 40% is predestined, 40% subject to free will (how much of the maximal amount available you will actually use depends on how conscious you get to be in this life, from 0% to 40%, with all in-between possibilities); and 20% is random and unpredictable and even gods don't know and no one controls. So the world is neither wholly deterministic nor wholly free-willy. It's a co-creation...

Right... that's real life for you... where the lesson is seldom what you're told you're going to learn, the "meaning of life..." -- ... -- I never answer the "meaning of life" question because "real life" is not "filled" or "not filled" with a particular meaning -- it is filled with all possible meanings all at once. Whatever you're looking at is not it, whatever you are NOT looking at is not it either... so what is it? I guess it's the second look... or the third, or the three billionth... however long it takes to "get it all" -- it's getting it all that's the meaning of life. It's something you see in hind sight, in front, inside, through others' eyes, all at once and in retrospect and in projection... the meaning of life is... as big as life itself, no bigger, no smaller.

You're good! I had to watch it three times before I got it.

Yup! Now when you see the time-sensitive opening/closing in the confluences of events and circumstances (mundane to cosmic) as clearly as the driver of that car must have seen the opening in the confluences of traffic (i.e. if he/she was indeed an immortal who SAW rather than a reckless aficionado of crazy risk-taking, a homicide-by-auto perpetrator in the making, or a space cadet who got unbelievably lucky -- or was being protected by a strong guardian star, i.e. destined to get lucky...) -- that's how the immortals do magic. I was trying to remember what this video reminded me of... I had this nagging "been there" feeling... and finally I did. Once I traveled to Europe to get together for a vacation with a college roommate/best friend of mine who lives there and whom I hadn't seen in ten years. I was jetlagged and not really thinking clearly, but instead of trying to get some sleep, as soon as we got together and ate, we went for a walk by the sea and climbed some rocks overhanging the water and couldn't stop talking -- and it was already dark, and eventually, where we were, pitch black. So then we decided to go back, and without thinking about it twice -- or at all -- I just jumped off the rock because I thought I was landing on solid ground a couple of feet below. No. In my jetlagged confusion, and in total darkness, I jumped into the sea right between the rocks sticking out and up like swords and daggers, and I felt one of them slash the wristband of my watch as the water closed over my head. I felt the bottom, pushed upward in a straight line, emerged, and discovered that I'm taking a swim in a crack between the rocks the exact width of my body (shoulder- or hip-wide), minus the watch that didn't fit in. I climbed out, wet and ashamed of myself and unharmed -- not a scratch, not a bruise, nothing but the missing watch. The next day, in broad daylight, we went to examine the spot, and discovered that where I took a dive was the ONLY place where I could jump without landing on daggers and swords for miles around, and the "bath tub" was every bit as narrow as I thought it was the night before, but seeing it for myself was still doing nothing about making me believe it. I was looking at it and I couldn't believe it. It was impossible to do this by chance, but it was done -- by me. I wouldn't be able to replicate it though -- and that's one difference between "modern science" and magic that modern science holds against magic.

Last letter is typed. The beginning is The Word. The end, The Keystroke.

Nah, he was in the know, being a top ranking member of the secret societies of the highest order. He knew that the archons who mated with earthlings were overwhelmingly male. (By the way, the Latin "cornu," one with horns, an idiom that came to mean a husband whose wife has been cheating on him, originally simply referred to the fact that a horned one was party to the sexual intercourse, but eventually they turned it around to pretend it's metaphorical and pertains to the husband rather than the hybridization buff... very good at hiding their traces. All coincidence theorists, at ease, please.)

No, but she may have given a pair to her husband.

No, SHE is the second wife of Abraham and mother of Ishmael, progenitor of Ishmaelites, aka Arabs. In other words, Hagar is known to the Genesis, the Koran, the Talmud, and a few more esoteric sources as a matriarch, and none of them mention that she ever played football.

A pair of cufflinks, a swift brush, rice paper, ink. Unframed and unsigned.

Nice of you to remember! Yes, I practice the version created by my teacher -- here's the beginning of the form demoed by him (the whole form takes about 5 minutes at a "normal" pace, and gets progressively more vigorous and sword-like toward the end.)