Taomeow

Definitely you are not alone. I was shaking my head at the "memories of birth" of a premature baby placed in the incubator and comparing them to my own... wow, what fun it must be to belong to the species of baby dawg describes! but unfortunately, a premature human baby is not this lucky. For starters, the neocortex which does our conceptual thinking for us is not there yet, it is simply not formed anatomically at birth... so stories of what one thought about when being born are akin to a story of, e.g., growing a beard at three days of age and mom complaining about the stubble interfering with nursing. The beard machinery is not there yet... and the conceptualizing machinery is not there yet. That's human. Some other species may be born with a cranium-full of abstract ideas about its experiences of the moment, but not ours. Regardless of whether you remember your past lives or not, in this-here life you are born feeling, not thinking. Feeling, on the other hand, is present full blast at birth, more so than in an adult -- not only all the machinery for it is already there but much of it is cranked up to intensity later unavailable to adults or even babies three months old. And none of it is mediated with neocortical ideation and conceptualization that disperses its intensity in adults. What kind of machinery?.. E.g., the retinas of the newborn baby are ten times more sensitive to light than those of an adult (which makes the "bright light in the room" mentioned by dawg an intensely traumatic experience in real retrieved memories of birth, of which I've witnessed a couple hundred, besides my own. One of the ways we screw up our species is by allowing birth into bright lights, something that never happens to natural/indigenous humans). On top of that, the retinas of a premature baby are ten times more sensitive to light than those of a full term baby. (Dawg, let me guess... your current eyesight is not 20/20, am I correct?..) Now then. When they cut the umbilical cord, the feeling experience is invariably that of suffocating. Again, natural humans don't do that, allowing the baby's own circulation to gain momentum before it will be separated from the mother's. The abrupt cutting of the umbilical cord and the horrible feeling of dying because one can't breathe right after being born is behind all subsequent suicidal activities known to man that involve the cutting off of air, unconsciously aimed at replicating the conditions of the unresolved original life-and-death trauma in order to resolve it. On top of that, in a premature baby, a special foam-like fluid that is released by the lungs a couple of days before full-term birth so as to soften the impact of air hitting this infinitely tender organ not yet accustomed to it is not formed yet. Which is why my earliest memory, the real one, is of breathing in what felt like coarsely crushed glass. And so on... And particularly because I have real memories and have helped other people retrieve them, I'm having a hard time with dawg's contributions of pretty fairy tales... The harm of these tales (not dawg's alone, of course, I mean the cumulative harm from all such tales) is tremendous. If we don't realize that we horribly traumatize our children by all the methods we utilize to "help" them into this world, the obliviousness will never end, and the cruelest abuse of the most vulnerable and dependent of humans, newborn babies, will never stop... and because the effects of a traumatic birth are permanently damaging and body-and-soul-altering, and someone has seen to it that every single modern birth is traumatic, we will never recover from our predicament.

Is this why the practice is called Spring Forest? A Spring Forest is Wood, located smack in the middle between Fire and Water. Spring Wood is Water's child, Fire's parent equally removed from both, or equally close, however you look at it. (Summer Forest would be Wood with Fire, and Winter Forest, Wood with Water.)

Yup, you don't really need to eat before exercising -- moreover, eating right before any practice, whether running, qigong, or even a sitting meditation is rather counterproductive. I've heard a saying, "you have room in your stomach for food or for qi -- take your pick." I've been taught that you shouldn't be very hungry when practicing (therefore, eat some time in advance) but you want to try to avoid doing anything on a full stomach other than digesting your food. That's because not only qi but also blood goes where the action is taking place. Food in the stomach signals to the body to increase the blood supply to the stomach in order to facilitate the action of the stomach muscles (did you know your stomach has muscles in need of exercise? I'll tell you more in a moment...) If you run on a full stomach, you have to split your blood flow between two equally demanding tasks, and as a result neither one will get an adequate supply. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to read while eating. The masters' simple rule of "presence" -- "when I eat, I eat, when I sleep, I sleep" is physiologically very sound, and can be extended to "when I run, I run." Meaning, I'm not trying to digest my food while running. Then again, I'm not a fan of running as a form of exercise. I do walking qigong. On an empty stomach. Now about the stomach muscles. Been reading Gurdjieff's autobiographical "Meetings With Remarkable Men." He describes, among other things, a meeting in his youth with a holy sage and a meal they had together, with a bunch of other people present. Everybody, including the sage, finished their meal while the young Gurdjieff was still nowhere near done because at the time he practiced yoga and its teachings required him to chew his food very thoroughly, something like 32 times per mouthful, to completely liquefy it before swallowing. The sage watched him do this and then asked, "Why are you eating like this?" Gurdjieff explained the rationale behind this, pre-digesting food with thorough mastication and with saliva, making it more available for absorption, blah, blah. The sage shook his head and said, "You are doing great harm to your body." How come? Well, he explained, the stomach is a muscular organ, and like any other muscle group in the body, it needs exercise in order for the muscles not to atrophy. If you never challenge it with strenuous tasks, if your jaw muscles are the ones doing all the work, the stomach will grow lazy and lose all its strength and become feeble and sickly as you grow older. So the opposite of what you're doing should be done to keep it in shape: while young and strong, you must swallow your food in large chunks, and even swallow some bones on occasion! This will train your internal muscles, which is a lot more important for health than what you do to train your external ones. I don't know if this is true, but Gurdjieff apparently immediately perceived it as the truth and followed the sage's advice from then on. He also dumped his yogic breathing exercises after further conversations... but don't let me recite the whole book here.

Thank you, Sean and Chunyi Lin!

Oh... I'm very sorry. No more, I promise. In my defense, I don't know who Jimmy Buffet is... I have unexpected but very sizable pockets of pop-culture ignorance because I didn't grow up in the US... I've never seen a baseball game, e.g. ... and I don't know which of the songs I've first heard recently were already an earsore to the locals before I ever knew they existed. When 3bob asked "whose fault is all of this," out of nowhere "some people claim..." popped into my head, so I decided to go with it. And I know it's my own damn fault.

Thank you, Mel.

All right, we might have a better chance at understanding each other and talking productively and enjoyably some other time then, with one prerequisite. First I will have to forget that you called ayahuasca a "drug," the Mother of the Universe a "fairy," and turned a rather universal insight, which in honesty and vulnerability I applied first and foremost to myself instead of granting myself an exemption (something that kills all insights into all human problems, the "I'm OK, it's you who has a problem" mentality), into a stone to throw at me. Wish me luck.

One of my teachers used to say, "when people say 'always,' 'never,' 'everybody,' 'nobody,' and so on, they are talking about a feeling of theirs that is 'always' there, 'never' goes away, is projected onto 'everybody,' and can be dissuaded against by 'nobody.' " Which is why I'm not going to argue. One thing for you to consider though. When I'm talking about shamans, I'm not talking about "them" anymore. Not from the outside looking in. You told me I was addicted to nostalgia, now I'm addicted to the spirit world? Do I have anything at all going on with me that isn't an addiction?.. I am addicted to only one thing: feeling alive. If I die, this will cause me to get addicted to feeling dead. What I hope to never be though is being addicted to feeling dead while being alive. Everything else goes.

There's more reasons for demonic attacks: 1. Unskilled, careless, or over-zealous use of healing powers with insufficient self-protection. Entities can jump from the cured party to the healer. This can happen to the best of the best -- a side effect of compassionate care for others while neglecting one's own safety. 2. Being known in the spirit realm as a Warrior, an exorcist, an enemy of the demons. Again, a case of the best of the best placing themselves in harm's way, for causes of the greater good. 3. Dabbling in OBE, astral projection, trance states and the like. In the taoist tradition, one only does that after having learned how to guard the body while the spirit leaves it and goes roaming elsewhere. Anyone not trained in these counter-trespassing techniques is at a great risk of an entity (or a whole bunch) chancing upon a vacant body and squatting. 4. Temptation into abandoning the right path, as in the case of Buddha, Jesus, and scores of others who had to staunchly resist a whole host of demons trying to seduce, scare, or otherwise distract them away from their quest. And of course there's many more, which is why I would advise against assuming that anyone bothered by anything spiritually questionable -- up to the worst kind of demon -- is being punished for having done something wrong or for "being someone wrong" for that matter. Not nearly always. Sometimes. But much of the time, the reason is something entirely else.

And my point was, they would and could stop if they so chose, unlike alcoholics with no shamanic resources. Shamans are always "abusing a substance," whatever the substance happens to be, also Hindu sages, taoist masters, and (gasp) buddhist ones who have stayed with the tradition, and Sufi ones, everybody. (Rick Strassman's richly illustrated classic, Plants of the Gods, has photographs of buddhist and Hindu visionaries and venerated masters in India smoking ganja from huge bongs, shrouded in clouds of smoke...) That's because they are not really "abusing," they are "using" non-ordinary states of consciousness, it's something that comes with the territory: they know what to do in an non-ordinary state of consciousness, where to go with it, unlike alcoholics or "recreational" substance abusers. Their consciousness is not ordinary, and states they induce to modulate it are as far removed from being "trashed" as the madness of a crazy person is from what anthropologists used to say about the "madness" as a default state of a shaman. The shaman and the alcoholic swim in the same ocean of consciousness, the difference being that the alcoholic is always thrashing about and drowning, and the shaman knows how to swim to reach the island he's aiming for, the ship he plans to hitch a hike on, the underwater cave he intends to explore, and so on. Don't argue it away from the "ordinary consciousness" perspective right away, try to think about it first?.. The shaman sacrifices himself, what Jesus is supposed to have done once, the shaman does with every single healing. How he handles his consciousness to be able to persevere for years and decades instead of bailing out on the third day is a miracle to behold, not an addiction to denounce.

You are very perceptive, 3bob. The problem is, I have some experience with public forums. They are not the best medium to tackle serious problems, questions, answers... I can hint here and there but I don't take it too far, stop, backpedal... have done it many times. The idea being, whoever has the ears will hear, whoever has the eyes will see, and the rest will keep looking at what their habitual-tint viewing glasses allow to see, and hearing what the standard issue ear filters will let in, regardless of what I say. Typing is a weak form of transmission -- there's no squeezing thousands of days of thought, feeling, research, reason, revelation and so on into a forum post. So all I can do in a situation like this is type an entry into a realm, and stop at that. Whoever is destined to cross the threshold, will, eventually. And everybody else deserves a little laugh, which I tried to provide. After all, tragicomedy is the genre of life...

That's quite true, but it's a top level skill. Absolute top level. Don't be fooled by people who come by the dozen to internet forums to announce they have it. They don't. I've pushed hands with someone marginally permeable, a cultivator of emptiness for some 40 years. It was absolutely unreal. Confused the hell out of all my senses. Yet his skill is not of the level that makes him empty to demons -- only to humans. Even his teacher, who's been practicing for 80 years now, doesn't have that yet, and keeps working toward that every single day. For us mere mortals, there's humble tools of magic to use in the interim.

Well, I do have one of those gourds. But I'll take a look at the article, thanks for the reference. LOL, yeah, raw garlic... You don't have to ingest it though if you are in a situation where repelling humans is not part of the plan. You can make a wreath of whole bulbs and hang it in your home on permanent display -- e.g. in the kitchen. I have one of those too. Helps prevent colds, among other things. Pathogenic viruses are of demonic origins, incidentally. A shamanic journey into a dimension where things are presented in their true and real form (rather than hidden behind appearances the way they are in our dimension) showed me their actual size -- not in terms of the physical size of the individual virus under the microscope, but in terms of their effect, the "reality size" of the physical, psychic, and spiritual problem they create in the human world. They are humongous. Very scary-looking, and as demonic in appearance as they get.

Alas, they used to sacrifice "young virgins" (or to put it in realistic historic terms, children) to assorted demons openly and frequently (and do it today secretly and frequently too) precisely because a good heart, purity, innocence is what demonic entities like for dinner. However, there's one thing that can spoil their appetite: courage. They like their victims terrified. The flavor they're after, adrenochrome, is released by terror. If you have no fear, they aren't getting what they're after. If you do have fear, take megadoses of vitamin C combined with niacin -- this will deplete your adrenochrome and make you unappetizing for the demon. Best strategy therefore is a combo of magical protection techniques plus vitamin C plus niacin plus a regimen of practices and techniques continuously strengthening your heart's "courage muscles" -- but NOT counterphobic behaviors, i.e. being afraid but pretending you are not by suppressing external manifestations of fear and conscious awareness of it. The latter will cause adrenochrome to accumulate in huge amounts (since fear you feel below your conscious awareness still releases it in the same amounts as conscious fear, but counterphobic behaviors drastically interfere with your ability to metabolize it).

Vegetalista shamans of Africa cure it with iboga, South American ones with ayahuasca, Korean ones with mystic dance, to name a few. But my entry was not about alcoholism at all. "That frozen concoction that helps me hang on" is many things to many people... Also, "searching for my lost shaker of salt" has a special meaning, although the author of the song may not know it. One of the spirits who chose to give me a bit of attention identified herself as Empress Wu Hou, who while in the flesh and ruling China was an earthly incarnation of Kuan Yin. She had a shaker of salt in her hand (ever seen pictures or statues of Kuan Yin holding a mysterious vessel? Well, you may have heard differently from "scholars" but that's what it actually is, a shaker of salt!) I asked her why, and she explained that people's lives have become bland like food without salt. Hence all the chemical, emotional, and spiritual addictions in search of some taste, flavor, spice to add to one's life. What's the real remedy for this blandness, I asked. She told me but I'm not supposed to tell. OK... what else was I gonna say... oh, this: in reference to shamanic "power," and their use of "synchronicity" as a "power tool," I found another good illustration:

I can only answer with a koan-ish entry... e.g.:

Wonderful! To this I might add that dismissive confabulations about shamans and shamanism are a symptom of having one's mind controlled by parasitic entities. Psychic manipulation of humans by these interdimensional predators is what the shaman has overcome. Naturally, they will do anything, from massive military suppression to Wiki articles to implanting religious and scientific systems and social institutions designed to steer the human spirit as far away from reality as possible and prevent its liberation. Not from mythical "samsara" but from very concrete enslavement of the species by another, a parasitic, predatory one. All the puppets who obediently dance to their tune are drastically reduced in their spiritual pursuits to what poses no danger to the predator entities. Shamanism is one modality that does not fall into this category. Which is why it is, and has been since the time of the invasion, persecuted and mind-controlled-against by all camps that work for the predator's cause.

"Revered" is a word a tad too strong to describe mentioning a historic fact. Just because I know the fact doesn't mean I "revere" Mao. The cat in a Red Army uniform is a pun for "Taomeow." "Mao" is the Chinese for "cat," but in Chinese the tone and the character are different from "Mao" of Mao Zedong. A Red Army uniform is an allusion to my Soviet birthplace. The cat's Chinese look is in reference to my taoist pursuits. But most importantly, I was having trouble downsizing my own picture for the profile (like most cats I'm not very computer proficient).

I did read that book and agree that it's well worth a read. The quote is from a Chinese classic though and its philosophy is what was applied in the situation I referred to, and attributed to Mao Zedung quoting that quote by a Chinese acupuncturist who first mentioned it to me before I ever read the book. It was in an article in a professional magazine he edits which he showed me. The article could have been wrong or Dung Xiaping could quite plausibly quote the same saying and apply to the situation he was talking about in his own case. But neither he nor Mao invented it. In any event, quoting was neither Mao's main vice nor Dung's main virute. In China, I've seen a different attitude to Mao than in the West. His portrait still adorns the presidential palace in Beijing. No one is saying he was a good guy, but no one is trying to pretend he never existed. Whereas Rockefeller who financed the spread of Western medicine in China at the time when the country was poorer than what Mao did to it later, so no med school could possibly resist a generous grant toward stopping its native curriculum and starting a Western one, is supposed to never have existed in its history. But he did, to an extent quite comparable with that of Mao.

Placebo effect is the single most misunderstood phenomenon modern science throws around ideas about without having the first. In France, they came up with an SSRE to our SSRI which yields exactly the same clinical results, although the latter is an "inhibitor" and the former an "enhancer" of "selective serotonin reuptake." So who's lying -- French double-blind placebo-controlled studies or American ones? What it actually means is that not "some" but ALL of the effects of the most widespread product of a multi-billion-dollar pharma antidepressant industry are placebo effects. If a healer consistently heals, I don't care how. If a healer consistently harms, I don't care how. I want the former venerated and the latter incarcerated. When Mao Zedong was making a crucial world-changing decision -- whether to ban and eradicate TCM off the face of the earth or allow it to exist alongside Western medicine -- he mercifully fell back on classic Chinese philosophy and allowed TCM to be practiced on the grounds of "we don't care if it's a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice." Much as I hate to agree with a tyrant, I see eye to eye with him on this one.

Placebo effect is the single most misunderstood phenomenon modern science throws around ideas about without having the first. In France, they came up with an SSRE to our SSRI which yields exactly the same clinical results, although the latter is an "inhibitor" and the former an "enhancer" of "selective serotonin reuptake." So who's lying -- French double-blind placebo-controlled studies or American ones? If a healer consistently heals, I don't care how. If a healer consistently harms, I don't care how. I want the former venerated and the latter incarcerated. When Mao Zedong was making a crucial world-changing decision -- whether to ban and eradicate TCM off the face of the earth or allow it to exist alongside Western medicine -- he mercifully fell back on classic Chinese philosophy and allowed TCM to be practiced on the grounds of "we don't care if it's a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice." Much as I hate to agree with a tyrant, I see eye to eye with him on this one.

This is quite common, but it's not lying, it's several healing modalities incorporated simultaneously. One of them, the one the healer in your example cited as the reason, is psychotherapy. A healer is very capable of doing things invisibly, but a patient who doesn't believe in things he can't see, touch, smell, or understand has a whole powerful structure of ideation working against an invisible, intangible, bloodless healing, making the task so much more difficult. Even if on the surface the patient "agrees to believe," or at least to suspend doubt, the unconscious mind will reject a healing it doesn't believe in. The second reason is incorporating the aid of associative processes, "like resonates with like" considerations. Billions of women use lipstick for the same purpose. They don't pretend that the bright red or delicate pink or vampire-dinner-caked-blood shade of their lips is the real color, but the color they superimpose (hiding reality, effectively lying) is meant to evoke particular resonances in the observer -- "sexy," or "innocent," or "bold," or "thirsty for love" or "friendly but unavailable" -- whatever message a woman is trying to transmit to the world, she will reinforce with a particular choice of a "fake" color. The color may be fake, but the message is true, and methods to intensify its truth and efficiency can vary from lipstick for flirting to pig blood for healing. Same mechanism of action. The third reason is sympathetic magic. This one is the most powerful of them all, but I won't be explaining it here. The fourth is tradition. It has always been done this way in all early cultures that sacrificed animals and blood (and humans too, on occasion) toward a particular cause. The Chinese emperors used to sacrifice a thousand oxen to gods on a designated day, every year, to secure good health for themselves and the nation. Haitian voodoo priests will smear the patient with chicken's blood. A med school classmate of my sister-in-law's bit off a live frog's head before an important exam... he couldn't explain why and grossed everybody out. I know why!

Awww... I don't feel like arguing, and I love your words and you!

I also "observe" all San Niang days... and ever since I started, I got to Texas... um, no, never been to Texas... but to wherever I was going... with not a second's delay (including on Chinese airlines which are on time, officially, about 45% of the time. But if you don't travel on a San Niang day and don't ignore the 6:66 on the clock either, and incorporate a few more "superstitions," you're gonna get a 100% schedule observance. Gotta run though, I'm almost late to taiji...)