Taomeow

Most excellent conversation, thanks to everybody who made it happen -- Sean, Apech, the bums who provided the questions, and of course Bruce Kumar Frantzis who answered them with such mastery. A very rewarding 23 pages!

The only situation where white rice is problematic is when you are so poor and disenfranchised that you have nothing else to eat. This is not theory -- this was a fact of life of millions of poor industrial workers in Asia who would have nothing but white rice provided for them. Predictably, some of them would develop beri-beri, a vitamin B1 deficiency, a problem which doesn't arise with unpolished (brown) rice that contains some of this vitamin in the outer layer. People who have a chance to eat something else in addition to white rice should not worry about this scenario -- thiamine is available from many, many other sources. In all other respects, "no nutritional value" of white rice is one of many outlandish nutritional myths born of a nutritional paradigm that has severed all connections with tradition, reality, cross-cultural awareness, and common sense. There's more lies about nutrition being fed to the public than about religion, politics, climate change, or the state of the economy combined. I think more effort goes into confusing this issue than any other. After all, food is real, whereas beliefs are imaginary.

Yes, I do eat rice on a regular basis like a good taoist. Moreover, I maintain a gluten-free household, so my pasta is also made of rice and procured at an Asian supermarket or a HFS. If you're going to buy in bulk, I think jasmine rice is a safe bet. And if you want to do your joints a favor, support your jing, etc., go with glutinous rice (this one, however, has very different texture from other kinds -- it turns into mucilage like oatmeal).

Pot intensifies rather than blunts your sensitivity to things physical, so it is not a useful choice for pain IMO. I'll email you.

Can I fly, can I at least watch pigs in the sky once again, Pink Floyd?

Well... there's all kinds of options, obviously, but I happen to know for a fact how a taoist hermit currently living in the mountains in Wudangshan solves this problem empirically. He licks his bowl clean after meals. The reason is energy conservation I think... carrying water, chopping wood, all that stuff sounds very romantic in taoist poems but as a daily survival chore requires prudent application of effort -- not too little, not too much... Apparently washing the bowl is deemed wasteful of water under the hermit's conditions -- and consequently of vital energy. I think taoists are not big on "now" as opposed to "not now" because "now" does not, in and of itself, conserve vital energy, while "timeliness" does. Some tasks are better put off till later -- rice takes time to cook, it doesn't matter that you're hungry "now," you will have to wait till it's done, and that's when you will get your peak nutrition, replenishing your vital energy. The bowl, on the other hand, will be much harder to lick clean if it's not done "right now." Whether he wants to do either the eating or the licking now or later doesn't matter. The bigger picture is what matters. I suspect the philosophers of "now" and the consumers seeking "instant gratification" have much in common... e.g., emotionality of an infant who needs his needs to get taken care of "now" and is hurt by waiting. The philosophers and the consumers are no longer really hurt by waiting, but if they always, always had to wait when they were three months old, they will seek to remedy the hurt for the rest of their lives. Too late though!

Yeah, "illusion" doesn't float my boat either. To me, a fruitful approach to the "created from scratch" vs. "uncreated and always just there" controversy proved to be "co-creation," a taoist concept of shamanic genesis. This, among other things, rids us of the fruitless "illusion" ideation applied to human experience. What illusion?.. Is it planted "out there" for me, or by me?.. or both?.. or neither?.. If neither, where the f... does it come from? And if both, then how is it different from "real?.." (Of course I won't even consider an induced hallucination "for me" -- the creationist kindergarten -- or "by me" -- the new age spiritual grandeur mania...)

LOL, I like both sage and thyme, and in general cook with many spices... but of course Timeliness is what keeps it all from burning! By the way, I just remembered that I learned my first and most important lesson about timeliness when I was eight years old. There was this swing in the playground... a mighty steel contraption with a solid steel bench suspended from heavy steel chains, probably made out of Soviet military surplus, judging by the style of it... It was hard to get it going (you did it standing up, not sitting, if you had self-respect), but once it did, it was unstoppable and gained crazy momentum. The brave among us used a spectacular way of jumping off. You got the swing to the highest amplitude -- and that meant it was nearly making a full circle -- and as it was going back and forth, on the uppermost "forth" you jumped, and it propelled you in a high, smooth arch so you were airborne for long seconds -- felt like an eternity -- and then landed softly on your feet. The trick was to jump at the very precise moment of the greatest "forward" momentum, not when it starts losing it and going back, otherwise the arch was nowhere near as neat. So I was doing it many times every day and thought I was an expert and got sloppy with timing at one point. I jumped too soon, when the bench was still gaining speed going forward. It caught up with me and hit me in the lower back, striking me down with the force of a charging elephant. So instead of forward on an arch, I went straight down. Splat. Perhaps my shining ideal of mastering timeliness (and time itself) can be traced back to the traumatic impact of miscalculating a "now" by a second that day long ago...

True. The protagonist was not spiritual in the sense the word is used at Western forums. She didn't practice anything. But after they ate rice together, she was the one who washed the bowls. I think anyone who subscribes to the "there's only now" doctrine would prove it empirically only if he always washed his bowl "now" rather than waiting for someone else to do it "later" on the basis of "it doesn't matter whether we will have clean or dirty bowls next time come dinnertime, since the future doesn't exist" -- or on any other grounds. I believe the only people who avoid coming across as mere slackers when celebrating "the power of now" are the ones whose middle name is "impeccable." Everybody else is better off with the idea of "timeliness" methinks. "Now" is no better than "back then" or "later on," nor worse, for doing things right. The only time that is the only real impeccable time is the timely time. Taoism is a science of timeliness where "now" doesn't get glorified over "not now" -- rather, "timely" is sought and "untimely" avoided, and this entails a lot of awareness/contemplation of the past and divination/extrapolation into the future before anything is undertaken "now." I love it. "A sage waits patiently for the right time to come. When it comes, he doesn't hesitate! He grabs it by the coattails and doesn't let it pass by. A sage values an inch of time over a foot of jade." -- Zhuangzi (quoting from memory).

Wow! I haven't thought of it this way. Time shoots us like arrows... Where we fly ain't straight though... hence the taoist bend (pun intended) on flexibility, pliability, ongoing adjustments... A rigid arrow is what deviates from the Way, by failing to adjust its course to the way the Way turns... It hits something and stops... A limp arrow, on the other hand, just drops down, having missed everything. A non-rigid non-limp one can fly forever.

This sounds very cool! Did you ever finish the story? I'd like to read it if it's available. I have bits and pieces of a time travel novel simmering on a few back burners... I've been trying to write it all my life, but it keeps mutating! ...such is time...

I remember reading a Chinese novel whose protagonist, a Chinese woman living in England, was having a relationship with a British guy prone to buddhist ideation. She heard this line from him a lot, and eventually they broke up over it.

I view taoism as a study of the nature of time, the science of time... but here's a pre-taoist experiment of mine that may have caused me to engage in this study to begin with, by introducing my own future to me... A mathematician who was explaining Minkowski spacetime to me asked me if I can visualize this in a 4D space, i.e. a 5D spacetime. This is impossible to just visualize, so I used my meditation skills to meditate on it. First, I meditated on the normal Minkowski spacetime which is a cone starting at a point (I placed myself there) and expanding in 3D at the speed of light. This caused me to travel forward at the speed of light. The spacetime left behind created the "inaccessible past" we all know and love. When I was comfortably within the visualization, I introduced another spacial dimension to the picture. What happened then was, the cone spontaneously reversed itself and the whole "future spacetime" started rushing toward me at the speed of light, with me at the point where it all converges, this one point in spacetime that is me absorbing it all at the speed of light. I let it happen for a few minutes but the vertigo and the omniscience became more than I could handle, so I closed the meditation. I don't have an interpretation -- just the experience. Apparently a 4D space is enough for time to take a U-turn, but you can't be the "3D you" and be there -- you are a "4D you" there too, and it's a different creature that might have a hard time explaining itself to the 3D creature. Practical tip I came back with? If you want to reverse time, you have to expand yourself.

Produce it, no such luck... the dopaminergic system is hardwired to maximum capacity in the last 3 days of gestation (and being born prematurely, e.g., means it's faulty/deficient/immature from the get go and will always be) -- thence it's only downhill. The pill form, god forbid... Dietary sources? -- very few, and not all of them edible, and most of them illegal. Dopamine deficient is just another word for between a rock and a hard place. The only way to reliably increase one's dopamine is to increase it relatively by decreasing one's routine ongoing need for it, i.e. stored, unprocessed, unconscious, unfelt, unexpressed, repressed trauma and pain.

L-tryptophan is a metabolic precursor. When there's enough l-tryptophan in the diet, the balanced body will convert as much of it into serotonin as needed (if the system is off, or metabolic co-factors are absent, or light-darkness stimuli are all wrong, or some such, it may convert too much or not enough). In the absence of stored pain (a mere theoretical scenario for a civilized human), it will convert only as much into serotonin as is needed for the next metabolic step -- melatonin, of which serotonin is a precursor. Again, when we are dealing with a healthy balanced body in a healthy balanced environment, it will produce exactly as much melatonin as needed. Light-darkness and, according to recent findings that make sense, electromagnetic stimuli are factored in when this metabolic step is undertaken. Any part of the chain being off will result in too much or not enough of any one or all of the players. Theoretically, it's a better idea to get to one's target substance via precursors rather than dose the body with straight-up surplus which it may not be metabolically equipped to dispose of properly. Empirically, I have discovered that extra l-tryptophan (as a free form amino acid) taken as a supplement with the goal of boosting serotonin and melatonin causes a cascade of adverse effects for me personally (known to dabblers in orthomolecular medicine of which I used to be one as "serotonemia," excess serotonin in the system), and that my serotonin is best left well alone. The body decides on its internal painkillers of choice on a case by case basis -- serotonin is not what mine wants if it wants to blunt the edge off a feeling, it wants dopamine... I won't elaborate because this will take us into the uncharted territory of "self-medication" masquerading as "addiction," but keep in mind that anyone addicted to anything other than sugar is merely attempting to handle some kind of pain that can't be mediated by serotonin, for complex metabolic reasons...

Serotonin is an internal painkiller. All internal painkillers are consciousness blockers. They make one believe that a painful experience is not really taking place, shielding the consciousness from the knowledge of the pain while not changing the actual traumatic experience, of course. In moderation, it is protective and allows us to function despite traumatic experiences we are having or have had and have repressed. If it is overproduced in order to cope with pain that is too great (the response is universal and does not differentiate between physical and emotional pain -- serotonin is released in response to both), the system gets overworked and eventually depleted. The current intervention of choice -- SSRIs -- is crazy-making, most receptors for serotonin are distributed throughout the body (with only 2% located in the brain), so SSRIs attempt to "target" an organ that is responsible for 2% of the target substance processing while no one looks at what the remaining 98% are doing to the system as a whole. There's quite a few serotonin receptors in the reproductive organs, e.g., so with SSRIs sexual dysfunction is guaranteed. Jing? Think "dead jing." In a cruel (like all of them) but educational animal experiment, rats were jacked up with serotonin, then put on a hot plate that was being heated up gradually, vs. controls who were also put on a hot plate but weren't on serotonin. The controls jumped off within seconds, unharmed, as soon as they started feeling the heat. The serotonin-boosted rats stayed on the hot plate for eleven minutes (sic) before they felt enough to jump off; their paws were scorched by then. I think this is the best illustration of what serotonin actually does to consciousness.

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Welcome, Lazy Cloud. The traditional view I've been taught maintains that tao has manifest and unmanifest aspects, stillness and motion, being and nonbeing. Wuji refers to the unmanifest aspect of tao, tao-in-stillness. This state oscillates into taiji, tao-in-motion, manifestations, phenomena. Taiji (aka yin-yang polarization) proceeds to create all manifestations ("the ten thousand things"). Ten thousand things revert back to the unmanifest after completing the cosmic cycle of Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation (aka the four seasons of being). The transformations of being into nonbeing and nonbeing into being are understood as a non-linear, circular, cyclical process, i.e. there is no "before" and "after," no "progress," only "unfolding" and "return," followed by, um, more of the same -- ad infinitum. Wuji to taiji, taiji to bagua, bagua to the 64 cosmic moments (situations or configurations of reality), the 64 situations back to no situations, to wuji. And again. And again... This is crucially different from the Indo-European modalities that postulate a "goal to reach" -- e.g. a paradise, or nirvana, or the luminous void, or some father in heaven or other, or what have you. In taoism (not in pop taoism to which you will be exposed along the way I'm sure ) you don't see the manifest as "samsara" and the unmanifest as "nirvana" or any such good tao/bad tao opposition that ultimately belittles and negates life and glorifies death. Being born is not a punishment for a crime in taoism; it's part of the natural cycle. Failing to be born is not a reward for good deeds either; it's merely an unfortunate obstacle -- visualize a seedling blocked by a boulder -- which you seek to overcome so as to grow and complete the cycle... and return. Tao is not opposed to any of its manifestations and doesn't seek to become unmanifest. Therefore a taoist's interests encompass rather than negate one's humanity, and one seeks to manifest it fully rather than to find a way to not manifest it. So "wuji" is not a goal and not a destination, anymore than a good night's sleep is the goal and destination of your waking hours. You need a good night's sleep, no arguing with that, but you don't live your life in order to "get there." Similarly, you need wuji -- but it's not the holy grail, you don't practice taoism so as to "get there." (Many westerners are very confused on this point, however.)

No. I'm implying that the truer the outlandish stuff is, the more opposition it will encounter. The world is mostly populated by people whose entrenched beliefs dictate that they fight to the death to keep them. Wouldn't you agree? By the way, Max did show an MRI (or a CAT scan, don't remember which) at a seminar in LA. I've seen it. There's a large white pearl in the center of his brain. I've no clue how to interpret it. Would you be able to make sense of a DNA test? I can read a blood test, a urine test, a liver enzymes test... but I wouldn't know where to start with a DNA test. However, there is indeed outlandish stuff going on in the world, despite anyone's beliefs to the contrary. Could Max be one of the people to whom it happened? I don't know. I've seen and experienced stuff that can run circles around our "scientific" doctrine singing "you can't catch me, doctrine, you are too rigid and obsolete and self-centered and self-satisfied! Too entrenched!" Real stuff... and outlandish as hell. I've no clue what Max has or doesn't have, all I know is, saying "this is impossible because it is too outlandish" is either replete with ulterior motives (entrenched beliefs that won't budge) or poorly informed, or both. The weirdness of a phenomenon is no proof of its nonexistence. Especially to a practicing taoist.

"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him." -- Jonathan Swift

Yin and yang are applicable to all phenomena, far as I've been able to discern. They abide by a few simple rules. Here they are: Nothing is yin by itself and nothing is yang by itself. Something is yin compared to something that is more yang, something is yang compared to something that is more yin. Something can be compared to itself at a different point of time and/or when engaged in a different process, and discerned as more yin or more yang at this point than it was or will be at some other point. E.g., a child of any gender is more yang than the same child will be seventy years later (no longer a child, of course, and no longer as yang as at seven.) "Female" is a manifestation of yin compared to "male." No woman is "pure yin" by herself. No man is "pure yang" by himself. In a group of women, some will be more yin than others, and these others will be "yang" in comparison to the ones who are "more yin." In a group of energy phenomena, some will be more yin than others, but a change in the energy configuration will cause them to change their yin-yang potentials. Extreme yin transforms into yang, and extreme yang transforms into yin. Kundalini is female. This female, when she is asleep, is very yin. Extremely yin -- silent, dormant, full of potentials, possibilities, blueprints for unfolding all folded in and hidden. If she is awakened abruptly, this creates perfect conditions for extreme yin flipping over into yang, which is the normal and natural behavior of these phenomena. Kundalini awakened gradually and gently is like a pregnant woman nurturing her future baby. Kundalini awakened suddenly is like a woman in labor -- more often than not premature and with the baby in the wrong position. A woman in labor is engaged in a yang process, that of externalizing the internal, realizing a potential, manifesting the unmanifest. This doesn't turn her into a man though. Just a woman who is, at this point, more yang than she herself was before. Hope this helps.

"Together" is right and the year 2011 is special. If you add the age you turn this year and the number formed by the last two digits of your year of birth (e.g., you are turning 32 in 2011, you were born in 1979, 32+79=111) -- everybody will get 111

I seriously don't get it. You come to someone else's home and demand that the owner impersonate the government, by granting or denying constitutional rights?.. In my home, a visitor who would insult me, my loved ones, or my cats would get thrown out. The neighbors swear freely and insult each other, their dog, and their visitors. However, they don't come to MY house to demand I do likewise. Which is why they do come across as far more sensible human beings than some of our resident, um, freedom-of-insults fighters?.. Ralis, do you regularly visit your neighbors to demand free speech in their houses? THEIR home, YOUR definition of free speech? GIH, do you? Just curious. Is it an ongoing campaign of yours? Then, um... while at it... have you visited the BP oil spill site demanding that the journalists be given free access to the sites they were denied access to? Have you taken it up with the FDA that a healer who says "I can cure arthritis even though I'm not an MD" shouldn't go to jail? Have you voiced your concerns when the leading genetic scientist was fired for saying that he found GM potatoes harmful for human health? Or even... let's take on a smaller target... have you asked Coca-Cola to disclose their secret ingredient protected under trade secret laws? What have been your freedom fighter accomplishments to date, besides righteous indignation over Sean's online house etiquette which does not include free insults for all? Inquiring minds want to know...

Sweet! You have a generous heart. I will ask the oracle...

Thank you for the love! I will ask the I Ching about the marriage.