Taomeow

That's a noble pursuit, far as I'm concerned. Labels are useful for as long as we don't equate the label with the contents of the bottle... If I want to see a "doctor," and get a "nurse practitioner" instead, I object... I want someone labeled as paid for. But it doesn't mean the "doctor" is a better human being than the "nurse practitioner," or a better "father," or a better "tennis player," or a better "painter," or a better "blood-type match." Labels are local. Humans are not. I salute your non-local pursuits... my point simply being, there's no need to abandon local ones in their name. They have their local usefulness. I am a "taoist," not a "Catholic," and this "partial" label helps me identify what I do or don't do with my local time... which is useful in many "local" space-time situations, including a crusade -- something a taoist has never engaged in. This was written before TVs and computers... These days, without going out the door, you can know the ways of the world as filtered through syndicated media... not exactly the same as walking those ways. Without looking through your window, you are usually stuck with Windows... not exactly the way of heaven, last I checked... ...so, listen to the sage, but don't forget you have two thousand years of interesting times on him... and don't be too humble, billions of people worked for two thousand years to give you what Laozi never had! Could he travel from China to the US in under one day? Nope. Could I travel from the US to China in under one day? Yup. Would he if he could? Based on a long tradition of "wandering taoists," I bet he would!

I have a bottle labeled "vitamin C" in my cabinet, and another one labeled "arsenic." The purpose of the labels if to keep me alive. My cat caught a mouse the other day. Tao has labeled my cat "cat" and the mouse, "mouse." That's why the mouse didn't eat my cat. When I asked a Chinese taoist authority about the most striking differences he discerns between Western and Chinese taoist thinking, he said, "Western thinking is too metaphysical." A taoist, generally, doesn't work on being "above others," nor "below." To be above others, one has to be a "specialist." A taoist is a generalist, which is "below" a specialist in human society. A taoist generalist is, however, someone capable of anything. Any-thing. That's not "above average." That's so far beyond "average" that no comparison is possible. How do you compare a successful lawyer to a spring?.. The taoist sage is so general, so inclusive of any and all "labels" while being exclusive of any one of them in particular, that she is much more like the latter... is the spring "above" or "below?" -- who can tell?.. "The sage comes like the spring, benefitting all beings."

Interesting point. English, the language of the Angles, or in another spelling Angels, is as real as the stars whence it comes. Are the stars real? Is DNA real? Language acquisition machinery is encoded in human DNA. WHICH language to acquire isn't, but "some human language" as part of normal human functioning is. A "mental construct" is physical -- it consists of a particular physical configuration of neuronal clusters and dendrites connecting them. The whole group designated to a particular task and only to this task functions as a bona fide organ and is present anatomically too. The configurational organ for the English language in your system is as different from your liver as your liver is different from your nose, which doesn't make any one of them unreal simply because it is "unlike" the other. Your nose is not just the external protrusion of flesh -- it is also the olfactory nerves going to your brain and corresponding therein to an "inner nose" where all of your smelling action really takes place. Just because you don't have (because you don't need) a specific protruding organ for "human language" doesn't make it unreal. The "human language" part of your brain and the "nose" part of your brain are anatomically indistinguishable from each other, and differ only in function. There are no functional "mental constructs" not backed up by physical, anatomical, physiological reality. Unlike fantasies, wishful thinking, daydreaming, etc., that form clusters of meaning but do not form clusters of function and typically begin and end in the neocortex, function-organ constructs that involve interactions with the body's other organs and systems AND with the outside world are systemically connected to your whole body (e.g., I'm a kinesthetic speller and store grammar in the gut, as a physical image of the word rather than auditory or visual) and to the, um, universe. When you speak English, all English speakers understand. Angels too. As for consistency in description of dantiens and meridians, well, meridians are described with precise consistency in classic TCM, and practitioners of acupuncture used to pass their exams by sticking needles in a hollow clay model of the human body with five to eight hundred holes made at the acupoints sites, sealed with wax. The model was filled with water. The practitioner who was taking the exam had to stick all the needles so that water would start squirting. It is a bit different with dantiens because a dantien is way more complex than a meridian, and way more complex than riding a bicycle. It's just not as cut and dry. It's more like something like your "humanity" -- can you define your humanity in clear, precise, specific, "scientific" terms that won't contradict those in which I define mine?.. If you can, you can do something very deeply complex and advanced and basically miraculous. But if you can't, it doesn't mean you have no "humanity."

Right! I've seen very similar ideas all over Nabokov's novels (well, he wasn't Chinese but he had Tartar blood ), and somewhere therein it is expressed explicitly -- or rather metaphorically: something like... well... I spread a lush, precious, richly decorated, multicolored carpet of a most intricate design and most exquisite workmanship in the hall wherein I invite my dear reader... and if dear reader stumbles at the threshold and gets entangled in the folds of the carpet and falls flat on his face and gets a bump on his forehead, that's his business, not mine.

Who doesn't?.. You don't see me contributing to the "foreskin restoration" thread -- I could, but I would have to turn East Asian for this one... I've read that in East Asia, unlike in the West, it is generally understood that it is the responsibility of the questioning party to understand, not of the answering party to be clear. (I read about it in relation to miscommunications between air traffic controllers and pilots in Japan -- a pilot is occasionally reported as walking into the traffic control room upon landing and punching the controller in the eye after being questioned too persistently by the latter.)

Functions are not limited to gross anatomical organs. Instead many of them (many thousands of them, to be precise) can be the outcome of particular configurations of processes taking place within or between organs. E.g., your ability to read in English is the outcome of a particular configuration of neuronal connections established between your eyes, your visual cortex, and your neocortex. This stable and specific configuration (which won't work for reading Sanskrit though) is the outcome of training imposed on a trainable system open to molding into a unit of meaningful and useful function. So your ability to read is a co-creation between your innate biological machinery and the specific shaping of its configuration achieved by learning. You have many organs and systems that can sprout such stable and specific networks of connections amounting to a new organ-function in response to training. If you look at the totality of neuronal links established between your brain, your spinal nerves, the nerves that feed into your muscles and joints, and the ones carrying signals back from muscles and joints to the brain, you will find a stable and specific configuration whose expertise is to know how to ride a bicycle. You created it by learning, it wasn't there until you did; what was there, however, was the opennes of the system to such training. You don't have such opennes to learn how to fly by flapping your arms though. The biological machinery isn't there, so learning would be wasted and would fail to create a new organ-system-function. Even more dramatically than not having the machinery, you have machinery for canceling the machinery you do have. E.g., if you take a prescription antidepressant, which is comprised of designer molecules not encountered in nature (the only kind patentable), your brain doesn't have the machinery to either process these molecules or create a new organ for processing these molecules, so it will respond by shutting down some of its normal functions ("I can't do anything with this, I better quit.") So this particular stimulus is creating a new function, that of suppressing and shutting down a few (or many) of the existing, established ones. Your brain is not "naturally" shut-downable by designer molecules, but it can be trained in response to this stimulus. Similarly, introducing ideation of particular type will accomplish the same thing -- shutting down some of the normal functions. E.g., if you firmly establish (install) the idea "there is no such thing as a dantien," your system will respond by shutting down instead of activating the dantien function. Bottom line: a dantien is a potential that you either activate or not, much like reading or riding a bicycle is a potential you either activate or not; a meridian is a function independent of your efforts to activate it, which however can become responsive to training and no longer run on autopilot. Similarly to breathing, a function that has double controls, the unconscious ones in the lower brain (so you breathe whether you mean to or not) and the conscious ones in the neocortex (which allow you to consciously regulate your breathing, change it, shape it, train it a particular way), meridians have triple controls -- involuntary electrochemical (measured and "proved" in extensive studies in several countries outside the anglosphere), involuntary sensory, and voluntary volitional. "Volition," a respectable player in such fields as, e.g., cognitive neuroscience, is the "scientific term" for what taoists or shamans might call "intent." It is a necessary constituent of learning to shape your system a particular way (e.g., if you refuse to learn Sanskrit, if your volition goes against it, you will never establish the function) but not a sufficient one (adequate training plus the opennes of the system to this type of training being two other constituents.)

Thanks for visiting the blog! -- it's nowhere near completed, but I'll get to the rest of it soon, please stay tuned! Yes, me and my son were taking the concoctions I described, and they taste absolutely awful... and they work. But back to rooting -- if you mean rooting in meditation, that's a bit different from what I was talking about earlier... not fundamentally different, but "technically," so to speak. Well, there's two kinds of meditation positions I know as particularly rooting -- zhang zhuang and full lotus. And what kind of meditation to you practice?

Thank you, Captain Dantienless! All those Chinese barbarians with their six-thousand-year-old BS have been waiting for you to set them straight. And all their ignorant Western disciples like me are ever so... um, confused?.. No, not that... Abused?.. Well, long as you're not the FDA, no, not really... Amused?.. Bingo!

Thank you for your generosity.

Well, I'm still me, quite a bit lazier than an average taoist should be. But everything taoist I do is deeply satisfying. If it fails to satisfy, it means I'm not doing it enough, or not doing it properly, or not doing it at all. Once I do it, it's wonderful. Anything -- study, meditation, taiji, ritual, magic, qigong, divination, feng shui, astrology, TCM, deep contemplation, mindless wu-wei, mindful wu-wei, wei-wu-wei, new practices learned from new teachers, old practices revisited, art pieces identified as metaphors of taoist ideas, food prepared nutritiously and deliciously with Wuxing and yin-yang principles in mind, sacred geometry of Hetu and Luoshu caressing my intellect, guasha and moxa and acupuncture and herbs taking care of any physical problems I run into, spiritual hustlers and emotional vampires failing to get more than the uppermost surface of my attention while the bulk of my awareness remains where I'd chosen to place it, moving a heavy piece of furniture (it, 300 lb, me, 135 lb, I win -- using taiji skills), traveling in peace because the dates are chosen from taoist almanachs... well, pretty much every day I have something taoist to do and be thankful for being able to do it this way. Does this answer your question?

Qigong forms are like musical pieces. Everybody uses the same notes to make them into the "form" of a Mozart symphony, a military march, or a pop hit designed to sell to, e.g., an audience of 14-17-year-olds. Is all music BS?..

Just sit there, take it -- when they cut you down, forest, take their oxygen

All right. It is a taijiquan skill, an advanced one -- beginners can't root, intermediate level players can't root very deeply, and people who only do solo taiji without the sparring are not likely to root realistically (i.e. they may have the machinery for rooting developed but they won't know how to use it in push-hands until they do, um... hands-on push-hands.) Advanced taiji practitioners have both rooting and "uprooting" skills (the latter is what you use against the opponent). When two taiji players of high-level skill do push-hands, all they're really doing is looking for the root to uproot. It's very easy when you're dealing with someone not trained in taiji or other "internal" MA (regardless of their experience with "hard" MA -- as the song goes, "the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all!") It is utterly impossible if you're dealing with a taiji master of considerable skill above your own -- he or she will never reveal the root to you, sprout fake roots to confuse you, etc.., while having no trouble spotting yours and sending you flying in the direction of his or her choice. This is the tip of the iceberg, of course... or rather, the little sprout above the root.

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." -- Bob Dylan http://www.youtube.c...h?v=iR3jC5uEO2Q

No, of course there is no such thing as a "Chen body type." I never said there is. All I said was that my teacher told me I have it.

I think there's a bit of a connection between one's body type and the style of taiji best suited for the person. At least a few of the Chens (possibly more, but I've only seen a few) are tall (taller than average Caucasians), long-limbed, and thin. Chen is ideal for this kind of physique. But I've also seen powerful things done with Yang by people who are shorter and/or stouter and don't seem "sporty" at all until you experience them in action... They use different advantages. Chensters have awesome reach and mobility while Yangsters have solid compact impenetrability to pitch against that... it's fun to watch one go against the other. Of course I'm "generalizing" on the basis of a very limited population sample, and on the level of an individual, generalities may not apply. But my teacher specifically told me when I first came to class that I have "Chen body type," so I'm not entirely making this up.

I'm sorry... I have too many cats -- still one kitten ISO a home from a litter of six -- do you want a cat? If you're anywhere near San Diego, you can have him. He's a good cat.

The trick is to focus not on the adversary's size but on his potential nutritional value. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_H1xHj31eI&feature=related

I voted too. Now if only Pietro agreed to combine his poll with my ET one and add "extraterrestrial" to his extramarital assortment of questions...

Of course -- what are you looking for? Describe your landscape of choice and I'll tell you where to find it! One place far, far away feels very special to me -- Altai, Siberia... I was very little when I lived there, so I have no memories of the place I could put into words... but I have pictures in the family album that fascinate me no end. Especially the ones where my father is climbing Mount Belukha, in the year I was born. Archeologists and researchers of Buddhist history assert that Belukha (which goes by many names, being the "navel" of Altai with the history of many peoples revolving around it) is Sumeru, the central peak of Shambala (Shangri-la). You can probably find a lot of information and pictures online, see if it appeals... if not, I'll find something closer that might!

Eastern Europe rocks! Let's see... cold, check (sometimes); mud, check (much of the time if you're kayaking); wet, check (often); leeches, check (but skills, check too: salt on the bastard!), bears, check (also cows mistaken for bears -- a herd of bears! -- terrifying... and they ate my bathing suit off a clothes line...) and, yes, special.

Yes to the wilderness, no to being a hermit -- one doesn't necessarily entail the other! I did several month-long wilderness trips with a group of people kayaking in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, going with the flow of rivers that make their course through forested, very sparsely inhabited areas. I would live like that, absolutely. Rowing 8 hours a day, making fire, setting up tents, cooking, foraging, fishing, running into adventures, exploring, learning about the edible and medicinal wild stuff hands on, watching the stars, gaining skills, "carrying water chopping wood," not a second of boredom. Never missed anything civilized except for a hot bath -- if I lived in the wilderness permanently, I would make some primitive arrangements to have that and I'd be good to go. But then a stint in the Peruvian rain forest convinced me that there's different degrees of "wild" a civilized person can get used to. It was way too wild. I felt overwhelmed and intimidated. The sheer noise of life, at night, is deafening, much louder than in a metropolis! A bit much... of everything. Don't know if I would be brave enough to make that into a lifestyle. But a European forest... anytime. (Not an American one, there's hardly anything to eat there!)

OK. I understand. A quick note though -- what tradition one follows may be immaterial of course but it may be very pertinent too, in that it can change you (cultivation!) if you work with the wuxing consciously. E.g., I choose customized practices that decrease Fire (I have too much, not good for Wood) instead of going with what seems to come "naturally" (Fire does! -- if a phase is over-represented, it will generate drives that seem "natural" but are really "natural for an unnatural situation" of imbalance only. Remove the imbalance, and the drives will transform... So "cultivation" seems "unnatural" and just going with "whatever seems natural" seems natural... and it's the other way around, turns out. ) Normal and natural for humans 100,000 years ago was to have no concept of paternity, therefore no concept of sexual "faithfulness," therefore no concept of "personal property," therefore no greed, jealousy, exploitation, enslavement. This could only work when all men and all women took care of all children. We've come a long way, baby... Most manifestations of human sexuality today are abnormal. Most aren't even sexual -- sex is a pain mediator so it is used as such by people who are suffering rather than being sexual. Furthermore, sex is the only current excuse for close physical intimacy -- so people are using it who merely need close human contact, which is normal for humans but has been made socially unavailable. (I've seen a somewhat different picture in China though -- same-gender pairs walking hugging each other, holding hands, but they are not gay, they are just expressing affection physically without this necessarily entailing "sexually." They simply don't know yet that this behavior will soon, as Western ways penetrate deeper, be removed from their arsenal of "what it's like to be human," and it will change everything forever... but not yet.)

"If you could have it your way, what kind of relationships would you have?" And why the wuxing designations? Wood = faithful? How about Wood with Fire (that's me)? How about Wood practitioner of Water methods (that's me too?) How about Wood avoiding Control by Metal (that's me again?) I definitely need the "all of the above" option to answer this question. It's different at different stages of one's life. E.g., when I was a teenager, I was naturally celibate. When I was happily married, I was naturally faithful. When I was unhappily married... and so on.

Thanks for remembering! I don't think I could say 4 hours... but 2 is where things start getting interesting, where the pressure you've applied to yourself "breaks" something, dismantles certain comfort grooves... and that's a prerequisite for something to emerge that isn't "same old same old" slightly refurbished. I've learned a walking qigong routine from Master Wang Liping, among other things, and I finally made a habit of doing it regularly a couple of months ago. I started doing half an hour, forty minutes, up to an hour, but no more... so I didn't know what lies beyond the 2-hour mark... Then a couple of weeks ago I went to a lake which I was told you can circumvent -- there's a trail going all the way around... but the person who told me that didn't specify how long it would take, and I approximately evaluated the lake's visible perimeter as an hour's walk and got going... Well, it turned out the lake is shaped like an inkblot, with all kinds of nooks and crannies you don't see until you see them, so after an hour of qigong-walking I discovered the lake's true shape and the fact that I was nowhere near back to where I started, not even close... I decided to press on and see what happens. Well, it took me another hour and a bit into the third one... and it was a different world at the end. So the second time I went there already knowing I'm looking at two hours minimum, and the "different world" emerged within the first half hour, it already knew me and was waiting for me... That's one thing with deep meditations in general -- once you've been deep, you've blazed a trail, and the next time you get "there" sometimes within minutes... even seconds. Meditation is not unlike all processes that follow the law of diminishing returns -- i.e. you have to invest such and such amount of effort before there's tangible results, but then if you increase the effort you get progressively less additional benefits... So I'm not sure if 4 hours is worth it... but someday I will find out. What about you?