Taomeow

That was your post number 555. In numerology, this number spontaneously arising signifies a "right thought" or "right action." (I've often wondered how buddhists know what thoughts and actions, words, etc., which they are advised to seek/avoid along the eightfold path, are right or wrong. Taoists consult assorted oracles and study subtle sciences to figure it out, rather than rely on their own subjective opinion or that of the guru or the scriptures or the popularizers. I do believe it's humility, if nothing else... but don't let me mess up the cool thread OR annoy the buddhists.)

Yeah, great idea for a thread. Taomeow (with its "echo" versions -- Taomiao, Miaotao, Miaodao, Tao Mau, etc.) is a multi-layered pun: a cat of tao or the cat taoist (well, I'm a taoist and I've been called assorted cat nicknames by friends and family all my life, have always loved cats, and honor a particular cat, who belonged to my grandmother and was five years older than me, as my first taoist teacher); a blade of grass (yin wood -- my wuxing phase), a traditional Chinese sword fashioned after a blade of grass (hence my "Sword of Tao" avatar sig), mysterious tao or tao mystery, the mysterious border between yin and yang and between the manifest/unmanifest, to name a few. Last but not least, I like to meow. I think it is emotionally more gratifying in many situations than to go "ah" or "wow" or "yikes" or "ouch" or "sheesh" and so on. I replace most interjections with assorted meows in RL, and I probably should be embarrassed, but I'm not, I'm sorry to confess. People who hang out with me long enough start doing it too. Once you've tried, there's no turning back. Cats have over 100 different meows for different situations -- to compare, dogs have only 10 kinds of bark, and the list of interjections humans use to express emotions may be somewhere in between, but closer to dogs. My current avatar is the Circular I Ching, which I consider to be one of the most profound graphic expressions of taoism ever created.

You may want to uproot (pun unintended) this book: The Tao of Medicine: Ginseng and Other Chinese Herbs for Inner Equilibrium and Immune Power, by Stephen Fulder. In a nutshell: there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking ginseng while you're young, except if you have fever (common cold, flu, or anything else with elevated temperature), or experience any side effects you subjectively don't like. It's true that older people get more benefits from ginseng, but there's many situations where younger people benefit from it too -- exertion, physical or intellectual stress (occasionally emotional too, especially for lowered mood associated with chronic fatigue), constitutional weakness, low energy (it's a MUCH safer energy booster than, e.g., jogging), recovering from an illness, cancer prevention, autoimmune disorders prevention... the list goes on and on. The book referenced above cites studies conducted in different non-English-speaking countries with young healthy people (e.g., groups of soldiers on a march who were given ginseng vs. control groups of soldiers who weren't). Check it out, then decide if you fit the profile of a potential young beneficiary of the wise old human-root. Sometimes I have this gnawing suspicion that most of the urban legends about ginseng (it's "too yang," "too hot," too this, too that) have been disseminated by those moneyed consumers who don't want everyone else to be envious and to generate too much competition and to drive the prices even higher. Good ginseng is very expensive, and the best ginseng is as expensive as unique art, i.e. there's literally no limit on how pricey very old wild roots can get. Some of them are indeed kept in museums.

Voodoo in Africa, hmm... You say "I hate Voodoo." You don't say "I hate Blacks because they are crazy and disgusting practitioners of Voodoo." Do you see the difference, pal? There's two kinds of hoses used to brainwash people into utter manipulability. The first washes out their brains and hearts. The second one fills the space thus created with hate-mongering lies. Anyone who thinks any people is worthy of hatred for any reason is a completely co-opted zombie created by this process -- and voodoo had nothing to do with the making of this zombie. I don't know what to do about zombies. I just wish I didn't have to share a forum with them -- or a planet.

Yup! The other day I was listening to Dennis McKenna (a rather bland, by comparison, brother of Terence) and he surmised that technology in general may well have been an otherworldly idea we as a species got transmitted via psychedelic plants connected to these other worlds. He believes there's a lot of AI in the universe, and our most likely contacts with alien creatures are contacts with AI, whether off-planet-made or earth-made. (The idea that earth-made AI is still alien -- to life, to consciousness, to the very essence of what consciousness is -- is close to my heart.) His psychedelic-technological connection does not seem to be arbitrary at all in the light of archeological evidence -- the use of psychedelics globally AND the first flirtings with technology came suddenly and explosively everywhere on earth at once, pretty much. I don't remember the exact dates -- maybe some 20,000 years ago? -- but in any event, they appeared simultaneously and pangaia style. To recapitulate back to why I think genuine consciousness can only be natural -- no AI superintelligence OR creatures stealing someone else's consciousness qualify -- well, because of exactly this, "recapitulation," memory, developmental history. We the biological kind date our consciousness back to the origins of infinity. In an unbroken family lineage you are the continuation of your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-great.... all the way, through thick and through thin, through everything that went before, no gaps anywhere. Consciousness is memory -- THIS kind of memory. Anything artificially created or predatorily feeding off someone else's consciousness doesn't have it and can't have it. There's no wholeness to any consciousness but natural live consciousness, and no amount of faking it or stealing it can change the fact. Flyers, whatever they are, can't be anything but machines. So are swimmers I've seen. It's just that there's different ways to make machines... as you say, "magic technology." You can make a demon with the machinery of your organic stuff, out of your own live DNA, but it will never amount to more than a semi-synthetic automaton. There's formidable machines out there, no question. But if you don't ever forget that they are machines and you are not... methinks that's the ticket. We have been treated in ways that make the distinction blur for quite a long time. I believe THAT's what has to be brought back into the sharpest focus. The glasses from my dream were supposed to aid, and it is only superficially ironic -- on a deeper level, it seems quite likely that we are allowed to USE technology to fight technology -- but prohibited to BE technology in response to technology...

It says "designed directly from second awareness" so it may be true! Seriously though, "second awareness" has yielded designs for some "otherworldly" technological devices in my own practice, so who knows... maybe the entrepreneur had glimpses of some such too, who am I to say he didn't?.. One thing I got this way, in a non-ordinary dream, was a design of eyeglasses for seeing these creatures. They are made of gold and quartz crystal (glasses, not creatures), with rings of gold wire in a rather tight concentric spiral over quartz lenses, leaving very narrow slits of transparency between the rings. I think the wire was somehow embedded into the quartz, like cloisonne, but since quartz is no enamel, it's hard to imagine the technology and the cost for making something like this... In any event, I did buy a pair of antique Chinese quartz glasses for starters, and if I ever have stray money to invest in gold wire, I might try to attach it in exactly the pattern I've seen in the dream (proprietary! don't try getting rich off this idea!)

Yikes. Reminded me of a hawk I know... There's a strip of a "scenic" highway going along the ocean which I fairly regularly travel on, and this hawk often hangs out in one particular spot, normally very high up in the sky -- maybe he lives nearby, occasionally I see him there doing some kind of surveillance, looks like. But that particular day, he suddenly fell like a stone out of the sky and onto my windshield -- almost -- avoiding the collision by a mere inch and then sharply going up. Like this: V with my windshield at the lowermost point of the V. I swear he did this intentionally, and I swear he looked me straight in the eye in the split second of near-contact, with total mischief!! I yelled after him, "Hey! What the f... is your problem?.."

I just saw this book at Barns & Noble the other day: "The Autism Prophecies: How an Evolution of Healers and Intuitives is Influencing Our Spiritual Future," by William Stillman. Didn't buy, just leafed through it, but it looks pretty interesting in the light of your question. Check it out.

Yup. TTC, to know what they're up to. Sun Tzu, to know what to do about it. I Ching, to know when to do it. If there was no monkey overlordship, I would be like that Roger Waters character in a song: You wake up in the morning, Get something for the pot, Wonder why the sun Makes the stones feel hot, Draw on the wall, Eat, get laid... Back in the good old days... And with the overlords came the second stanza: Then the goddamn fool Invents the wheel, You spend the day listening To the whiteboard squeal, You spend the day looking For a parking spot, Nothing for the heart, Nothing for the pot... (quoting from memory... hope I got it right.)

Thanks for making things easier for me. I don't tell my cats about Ancient Egypt either -- not the worship part anyway, I do tell them about how they used to make themselves useful catching mice. In my family, "he/she doesn't catch any mice" is occasionally said about humans, and means "he/she is like a spoiled cat -- minus the looks."

Well, all across the South American continent, it was the second most widely used entheogen before the white man's intervention. There's many techniques besides this one, but ayahuasca is the one that provides (among many other things) the interplanetary/intergalactic/cosmic/universal connections more reliably than anything else. The explanation goes something like, the physical vine has underground roots that interconnect the whole of the rain forest, diving under the Amazon, emerging everywhere, climbing the tallest trees, tumbling down and burrowing deep into the earth, communicating with every creature living there (95% of all species of flora and fauna on earth live there) and penetrating into everything -- but the nonphysical (spiritual, energetic, conscious) roots stretch farther -- all across the universe. It is thought of as the universal "internet" of sorts, connecting the whole of creation. She can literally connect you to absolutely anything. But most of it is beyond what you can "process," so a shaman learns when and how to "stop," among other things. Various other plants (and techniques) may be used in conjunction with ayahuasca, some of them work as "stop signs" -- e.g., tobacco "takes you back" to normal reality, the shaman can build a bridge of smoke for this, or blow the smoke into the top of your head and help your spirit back in.

By the way, there's an internet-connected place in Iquitos (not really a cafe, just a bunch of computers you can use for a small fee, also telephones...) where I walked in to use a computer after I returned from the rain forest, and there were pictures on the walls, by a local artist clearly inspired by ayahuasca, and one of them depicted "my" swimmers and "my" interactions with them -- as exactly as though it was a photograph. I started pointing at the painting and whispering (so as to stop myself from screaming), "I've been there! I know this place!" Not that I needed extra proof that I didn't "project" anything, that the place exists -- in a dimension I would be hard pressed to define but also "here and now at all times for everybody" -- but the picture left me quite shaken none the less.

Um... google up Pablo Amaringo's art. He's one of the (quite a few) painting ayahuasquero shamans who can give you a visual idea of what gets through when you open the stargate which your pineal gland is... There's no clear-cut division between "terrestrial" and "extraterrestrial," that's one thing you start noticing... The Ayahuasca-Alien Connection An excerpt: The spaceship motif has an important place in Pablo's visions. As we saw earlier, when the curandera who cured his sister gave him ayahuasca, Pablo saw a huge flying saucer making a tremendous noise that made him panic (Vision 7). Don Manuel Amaringo, Pablo's older brother, has a similar story. He told me - with tears in his eyes - that the main icaro he employed to cure many people he learned from a fairy called Altos Cielos Nieves Tenebrosas, who came in a blue spaceship: She asked me: 'Do you want to listen to my song?' She sang and that song I have always kept in my heart. In spite of the frequency with which Pablo depicts spaceships, he is sparse in his commentary about them. Pablo says that these vehicles may take many shapes, are able to attain infinite speed, and can travel underwater or under the earth. The beings travelling in them are like spirits, having bodies more subtle than ours, appearing and disappearing at will. They belong to advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that live in perfect harmony. Great Amerindian civilizations like the Maya, Tiahuanaco, and Inca had contact with these beings. Pablo says that he saw in his journeys with ayahuasca that the Maya knew about this brew, and that they left for other worlds at some point in their history, but are about to return to this planet. In fact he says that some of the flying saucers seen by people today are piloted by Maya wise men.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) by Wade Davis is a book you might enjoy reading. (Please disregard the Hollywood treatment of the subject... sheesh, I can keep saying it till the cows come home... the cows never come home anymore, and everybody thinks voodoo is what the movies told them it is.) Wade Davis is a researcher with Ph.D. degrees in biology, anthropology, and enthobotany, all from Harvard University. He started out his investigation of Haitian voodoo by being sent on a research mission. He ended up becoming an initiate, practitioner, and possibly priest of voodoo. (Yes, a less-known case of the Castaneda syndrome... this happened to materialistic, scientific, thoroughly indoctrinated "researchers" of these things on occasion... more often than once or twice, per my sources... Michael Harner the scientific "researcher" of shamanism joined this glorious company too... and quite a few others...)

Nice! I've tried playing with "tails" but forgot how much fun it is. Kangaroo is great! Dragon is awesome! But so are cats, dogs, squirrels, monkeys, rats, shrimp, swallows, sharks, seahorses, whales, eagles, wolves, giraffes, man oh man... ...why oh why did they take our tail away?.. goddamn motherwaggers...

I can imagine. The name, huh? I'm definitely no Sherlock Holmes material... missing the obvious. That, but also my pondering a curious fact -- my husband, who is a twin, and whose eyebrows are rather bushy and might beg for trimming this or that hair from time to time, has had these shaving-off accidents, not to the extent that the eyebrows are gone completely but quite to the extent that might cause someone who knows what they really look like to raise an eyebrow... So I thought you know some esoteric truth about twins specifically being prone to eyebrow-shaving accidents... His brother, by the way, never has these accidents... now, Twinner, help me zero in on the esoteric something or other that may or may not be there... Are you the first twin or the second? and by the way, I hope your cats live long and prosper, I didn't mean to make them paranoid... I didn't know you had cats to begin with, may they meow on.

Thank you for the song. Second song of the second group? A very faint echo of the resonance of what you were talking/thinking about just prior to hearing it, of the kind that happens every day and doesn't mean much. If it was the first song you heard with the discussion still close in time and on your mind, it would have been a bit stronger. No, let me rephrase: if you resonated with the subject matter more, it would have been the first song to play. However, if you start noticing such "coincidences" more, and paying attention to the ones that resonate with you more, that's dipping a toe in the flow of real (not pop and not belief-based and not stage) magic, the sturdy survivor of all those assaults on its very existence by all the weapons of mass instruction used against it over the centuries. If you do, and feel something, it means your toes weren't too badly bruised and numbed out by all those weaponized marbles falling on them.

That's because some people like talking or listening to other people regardless of the subject matter (and by the same token, dislike talking or listening to some other people regardless of the subject matter). Manitou might enjoy listening to you, e.g., regardless of what you're talking about. I for one am fully capable of enjoying talking/listening to anyone going on about anything as long as they don't put words in my mouth and then argue with what I never asserted. (E.g., I'm referring to your "you think that" and "you believe that," e.g. you tell me what I think of my mind -- locked in the brain, is it? -- and this and that... When you say, "I, Goldisheavy, think that" and "I, Goldisheavy, believe this" instead, it's much more fun.)

How did you know? Did Twinner ever mention something before that may have led to this conclusion, or did you infer it from the eyebrows episode? If the latter, I'd like to know how!

To never stop learning is to never die, as someone famous (forget who) may have implied when he said, "If a man no longer has any conception of excellence above his own, his way is done, he is dead." Lucid dreaming is what my system of magical training teaches how to avoid until you master lucid living. What I meant was, I studied magic and I studied what you say magic is -- hypnosis (erickssonian, in particular), NLP (very early in the game -- Frogs to Princes I read fresh off the press, and then practiced on a friend who is a Freudian psychiatrist and who was absolutely pissed when I finally revealed to her what I was doing), even some gypsy techniques (far out and so efficiently mind-controlling that I suspect they might date back to Naga-Maya) and assorted trance inducing methods, including instantaneous -- and I assert that the two systems are worlds apart. Not "everything" is a suggestion to self or others. Magic is one thing that isn't. To illustrate: I found myself in need of a new car, which wasn't part of the financial layout of my life at that point, so I did a taoist magical ritual, explaining to a certain deity what I needed the car for, why I couldn't buy it, and specifying the time frame: by the end of the month. In two weeks, elderly relatives who had a car but didn't drive anymore suddenly decided to give it to me. If anyone fell for a "suggestion," it must have been the deity, because no one else knew.

Gold, I would be much more inclined to examine your POV closer if you were a practitioner, or at any rate a student, of anything that you could point out to me as the source of your theories. I am a big fan of theories that are conjoined at the hip with practices... first hand empirical knowledge is different from hearsay, in my humble experience. Theories which I didn't have a chance to explore empirically, I examine with much interest when they come from people who did have such a chance. Did you have such a chance? What did you study and practice that makes you assert what you assert?

The difference between hypnosis/suggestion and ganying/magic is that the former is arbitrarily applied, it doesn't harmonize with anything -- with the flow of the seasons, with the position of the stars and planets, with the phase of the moon, with the activities of animals and plants, sages and poets, deities and spirits... and so on. It is decided upon arbitrarily and applied via a route of abuse of power, and it doesn't enter the natural pattern to harmonize with it while creatively modifying it toward some spiritual expression or need -- no, it enters the natural pattern to bend the latter to its will, to disrupt it, to change it toward an ulterior goal. Not so with the story I told. The ganying of it -- my stumbling across a well, the turtle (messenger of ganying in taoism, as I was to discover much later... for the markings on its back presented Hetu, the map of creation and the source of all taoist fundamentals...) scanning my mind for the problem and the solution, finding the story of a well somewhere there and bringing it to my conscious awareness, so I could take this well and turn it into the resonating connection between me and the girls, a connection disrupted earlier by my failure to resonate with their feelings... That's pristine magic, with minimal intervention from the practitioner-to-be, and with no disruptive suggestions involved. Of course I didn't know any of this at the time, it's only in hind sight that I can evaluate the situation as an "authentic ganying application." Many moons later, I can apply ganying in much more intricate ways, and consciously at that, but it never involves suggestions or otherwise messing with anyone's free will unbeknownst to them. I just look for natural opportunities. To know when, where, how they arise, people study magic. A study of magic is a study of reality... natural reality lost to most modern people. Learning and practicing real magic takes you back to the time when it wasn't lost, when people had senses and sensibilities to notice and phase in what today they don't and can't... unless they study magic.

That's quite real, but it's not magic, it's "suggestion." The TV, e.g., in addition to its visible and audible brainwashing techniques, is also programmed to emit electromagnetic frequencies identical to those the mother's brain generates when she is breastfeeding her baby. All of it is nasty but none of it is magical.

Thank you, Marblehead. You didn't step on my toes though. Could you have dropped some marbles from your head on your own? In which case I won't blame you if you don't try to tiptoe through the tulips -- no need to let your toes suffer any extra discomfort on my behalf.