Taomeow

This is a song of the Winnebago tribe recorded by ethnographists at the end of the 19th century and translated by a Native American author: A man was going to die. He went to the top of a hill and lay down. Briefly he slept. When he awoke there was a circle of animals. Each animal gave the man his own personal Medicine. Raven said -- e-he-a! e-he-a! Then he spit on the man and gave of his own Medicine. The man felt better. Turtle said -- ahi! ahi! ahi! ahi! Then he gave the man of his own boiled Medicine. The man felt better. Black Hawk said nothing. He gave the man of his medicine right on the place Where the man hurt the most. The man felt much better. Then all the animals said -- "Human, in a similar way, You will cure your fellowmen!" And the man was given the Flutes of Power. And he became a great Healer, a powerful Medicine Man and it was because the animals Gave freely of their medicine.

I take no delight for granted... Merlot sunset dies to delight me.

I'm reading a work of nonfiction by a Chinese author. She describes a visit to Vietnam where she discovered that written Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet, and so she couldn't read anything, because the words were, well, Vietnamese, with their pronunciation rendered in written French. She asked a guide, "when was Vietnam colonized by the French?" "In the 19th century," he replied. "What was the written language of Vietnam before that?" The guide didn't answer. So later she came across some ancient writings in a temple, carved in stone, hundreds of years old, and discovered that she could read and understand them perfectly because the written language of Vietnam before the French colonial innovations was Chinese. Like the author of the book, I believe that it is very necessary to know what the source is of any and all phenomena one might lay one's mind on... The French colonization, e.g., is the source of the current state of affairs which makes it impossible for Vietnamese writers to communicate with Chinese, Japanese, Korean readers, and vice versa. I don't think it's unnecessary to know that things are derived from other things and the consequences are far-reaching... I wasn't putting down the Japanese, merely tracing the "ninjas" to their source. When I was exploring the ninja lore, I discovered that I can "read" ninja-stuff simply because I can "read" taoist-stuff... and I think it's very cool when things are made durable enough to be "read" by another culture, at another time. "Heng," the ability to endure and last, is one of the "great virtues of tao." I was pointing to that, I didn't hold it against the Japanese that they recognized and followed the Way... if anything, I was admiring them for this. Smart move. And pretty taoist in its own right -- "the handle follows the blade, but it's the blade that puts itself in danger by thrusting ahead, being the first, making the way -- while the handle which follows it is safe." A ninja proverb straight from a taoist classic.

Well, returning to the Source is different, because you don't return "for good," nor seek to, at least not in classical taoism. I think I've written on the subject before, more than once, so I'm not gonna bore you this time. I have no rats among my Four Animals, but I have an important Snake in the Month Pillar (which is more influential than the animal of the year of birth, per my sources... the Month Pillar corresponds to one of the "twelve zodiac signs" of Western astrology). And Snakes are pretty much the prototype model for dragons, minus the frills. I also have a Tiger in my chart, so the scene for alchemy is set... I'm merely following my destiny when I focus on these two animals. My Snake is green (Wood), so I can take her forward in the cycle to Fire, wings, heaven -- or backward to Water, depth, primordial Mother... Needless to say I choose the latter and so all my practices are "back to the...." whatever it is, it's always about "return."

I didn't pin them against each other, I pinned one to the other's coattails. Which was historically though not politically correct.

Maybe... but I've seen objects of the traditional art form in the Shaanxi province, cut-out paper "cartoons," that looked suspiciously like anime...

um... nirvana is not a taoist concept, nor a shamanic one, so I don't have anywhere to put it and don't know where its proponents put their ancestral spirits. In taoism, ancestral spirits have different fates just as living humans do. Reincarnation is normal, and you don't particularly fuss about what you reincarnate into ("what will I be in my new life? A rat perhaps? Or a rat's liver? I look forward to that... where can the great tao take me where it isn't good?" -- Zhuangzi). Being stuck in the spirit world and failing to reincarnate is unfortunate. This happens to people with unresolved issues of life or death. Such spirits are traditionally helped along by taoist professionals (priests and monks) so they can find their way and reincarnate properly, and by lay folks who make offerings to ancestral spirits. I for one do. I know that some of my ancestors were victims of a violent historic process and didn't die peacefully (most people killed in wars become lost in the spirit realm, e.g.). So the contradiction arises only if you mix two doctrines that take a diametrically opposite view of what life is, and consequently what death is -- the Indo-European one and the East Asian one. This mixing and matching leads to the third one, "new age" -- and it's funny that "new age" is ages old... I've read 2200-year-old documents (Sima Qian) lamenting the hodge-podge of "modern beliefs."

Name one thing Japanese not borrowed from the Chinese. Wait, I got it... SONY -- that's Akio Morita's native child... but wait... coming of age with a nice infusion of David Rockefeller's money -- they were Trilateral Commission buddies... and contrary to what detractors ("coincidence theorists") assert, the acronym SONY stands for Standard Oil of New York. THAT's one thing Japanese that is not Chinese in origins... but as for the older stuff...

Funny... two left shoes, spinsters both of them, looking for two Mister Rights.

Did you think I told a tongue-in-cheek story? No, I swear it's the truth. I've never seen anything like this either before this encounter, so someone who hasn't experienced something like this may be tempted to do what Thelerner did with it... but Dr. Xi is one of China's "national treasures" and as real and as far from the style of American Acupuncture Association or whatever it is called as can be... He has a little museum of acupuncture needles dating back hundreds, some of them thousands of years. Some of those older ones look like darts, spears, miniature knives... what we know about needles used in Chinese taoist arts is the tip of the iceberg no bigger than a needle pinprick.

Oh, I didn't realize you made it... cool! When the patriarch of my Chen lineage, Chen Zhenglei, was giving a workshop to our group, he made everyone draw the sign of eternity (the sideways figure 8) deep into the ground with the pelvis... over and over and over... as the correct way to shift the weight between the legs. The punch line being that the legs have to be already very strong to support this movement. Mine nearly fell off.

Ego is a term of Freudian psychology, and Freudian psychology is one of the most contrived and least fruitful approaches to the human being ever concocted. If you study taoist anatomy, physiology, and psychology, it disappears, like all other junk memes replicating mental constructs and abstract ideas with no concrete organ-system-function task in the real world. Everyone who tells you you have an ego is merely making a confession: "I am infected with a Freudian meme, and it commands me to transmit it to you." All you have to do is politely decline the offering with a compassionate thought, "I forgive you, for you are not the one in charge of what you are doing, saying, or thinking."

I guess it depends on the intent. In China, a high level TCM/taoist doctor gave me acupuncture by throwing needles at me from a distance. It was very scary. There was no need to do it this way, but he can, so he chose to have some fun with it. He did it several times in the course of the 6 weeks I was seeing him. In general, his style of acupuncture is martial -- he jumps at you and jams a needle in with no preparation even if he doesn't throw it from a distance. If he chose to use his needles to hit the dim-mak points instead of the acupoints, I don't see what would stop him. Most definitely not the distance of a few feet.

Thanks for the picture. Any idea why the pelvis is shown as going side to side? A valuable tip from Zhang Sanfeng's writings: "the breath shouldn't go so high as to hit the heart from below, or so low as to hit the genitals from above."

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Frederick the Great, the German emperor who ruled Prussia between 1740 and 1786, issued the following proclamation in 1777: "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. Everybody is using coffee. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors, and his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be dependent upon to endure hardship or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war". I always think of people who take big pharma's anti-coffee propaganda to heart as "Frederick's model subjects." He was absolutely correct though in his assessment of coffee-drinking soldiers as somewhat insufficiently bloodthirsty and excessively smart. Coffee has been shown to consistently increase intelligence in habitual users compared to their non-coffee-drinking peers. Which is why attacks on coffee have been arranged by the powers that be consistently throughout history. Smart subjects and smart soldiers are so much more difficult to govern. There was a Turkish sultan who went to the extreme of illegalizing coffee, ordering all of it confiscated and the burlap sacks of coffee drowned in the sea. The subjects rebelled, captured the sultan, stuffed him in a burlap sack and drowned him in the sea. Which is a sure sign no fluoride was added to the water they were using to make their coffee.

--Moderator's Warning-- Please, no ad hominem attacks. "Your crappy opinions" is nowhere near as close to our guidelines as "your opinions I disagree with," and "you are one of the cancers" is a statement you can make if you are a PET scan -- if you are not, consider yourself disqualified from diagnosing. Heated debate is fine, but please no name-calling of your opponents.

Oh yes, it is indeed an alternative. Meaning, you can have one or the other. We would have to define "strenuous" though before deciding whether it's healthy or not. A low taiji stance is extremely strenuous, but it is not straining your internal organs... Maybe instead of just "strenuous" we need to specify: "strenuous for your internal organs" will give you short term external benefits. Health and long life are not "short term external benefits." The taiji guidelines -- "soft on the outside, hard on the inside" -- are also helpful methinks. If an activity makes you hard on the outside, it is making you weak on the inside... long term. So -- anyone has a picture of a hundred-year-old bodybuilder in great shape? Don't think so... X-rays of a great, flexible and strong bone structure inside?... Not really... An account of taking up running in one's youth and never needing a doctor in one's 100s?.. An example of a long-lived healthy Olympic champion?.. Anything?... Didn't think so... Yet videos of a hundred-year-old taiji master doing amazing stuff most teenagers would find hard to replicate have been posted on this site. And my 54-year-old taiji teacher, when I asked him for a reference to a good TCM practitioner, said, sorry, I don't know any doctors at all, I have never been sick in my life...

Taijiquan, most definitely. People who practice under the guidance of a good master will testify that after a good practice they can have all the external signs of dramatically increased circulation and metabolic activity -- sweating buckets, pink glowing face, etc. -- while the heart rate remains that of sitting on the couch reading a book, and respiration rate, ditto. It's a miracle, every time. The slower you do your form, the more pronounced the effects. Even more so with low stances. Even more so with a slow pace, low stances, and a meditative state of mind maintaining awareness of the kinesthetic sense.

Sorry, I'm not that invested into doing Ph.D.-worthy research on this, I went with the very first entry google brought in response to my inquiry, and the inquiry was shaped by my having read Einstein's biography years ago which cited the same problem: violent abuse of his first wife, apparently out of -- gasp -- scientific jealousy. I've spoken with physicists on many occasions (I know many, having had math and physics professionals among my best friends, boyfriends and husbands with some consistency) who are of the opinion that Einstein's first wife was a brilliant physicist far surpassing her husband, and that he stole his best ideas from her, intimidating her into submission with sheer brutality. Get back to me on this one if you want me to uproot evidence you will accept, right now I've no time...

OK... When I was four years old, I was given a silk Chinese bedspread, golden in color, with two huge dragons adorning its borders. It was a rather exceptional addition to my otherwise Spartan material world. I was growing up without such bright colors and exquisite workmanship in the environment, and I was simply shaken to the core of my being to find out that such beauty, such love for the craft, and such mystery can exist in the human world, in the material world. The bedspread instantly became sacred and remained so for over 25 years, till the day it disappeared as soon as it reached Italy (the dragons may have taken off when they found a more suitable climate for themselves). The advantage of growing up with no material possessions, the way I was growing up, is that your head winds up being screwed on right at least in one respect -- you don't despise the material world, you have no reason to, you weren't force-fed it, you weren't overfed it, so you learn to notice and cherish love in this often neglected manifestation -- in the objects of beauty and utility created by human work, through which artistic, creative, tao-like spirit of the maker keeps flowing, from the heart and mind to the fingertips and into the material object, imprinting itself in its every fibre. I seriously believe this is something I got from those two dragons. The Chinese dragon is supposed to have nine attributes, and among them are the love of the arts, painting, music, and of course silk. They kept telling me bedtime stories about themselves for 25 years... The Chinese dragon is often depicted guarding a pearl, which is subject to much speculation. What is this pearl? Some say it's only symbolic and means wisdom, or alchemical accomplishments, or one of the dantiens, what have you. But in reality, the pearl is the dragon's egg, which is indeed guarded very closely, and carried under the chin for much of the time it takes to hatch (a long time). In the beginning, the egg is white with a pearly sheen, which is why it is thought of as a pearl. But as time goes on, it gradually acquires a golden hue, and toward the end of the term, it shines like real gold. That's one of the claws sticking out of the cloud that I've shown you.

Where to learn about dragons? Right here! What do you want to know about them? A "trained eye" sees the periphery as well as, or better than, the center of the visual field. There's many training methods. "Open focus" and "soft gaze" of some MA, "open-eyed meditation with awareness resting in the eyes" of Dzogchen, Castaneda's Don Juan method (loose but unwavering focus on the far horizon while walking, with continuous awareness of the periphery), night vision training, etc.. Then again, you might just get lucky...

Please vote! I am trying to confirm or refute certain statistics I've come across as to the frequency of the phenomena in the population.

Definitely. Thanks for the memory!

Or as Golda Meir once put it, "Don't be so humble, you're not that great."