Taomeow

Nice grad papers to choose from! Mine, many moons ago, were on the stylistic usage of deformation of idioms in English and the like... I think I still do that. Web/No Weaver was my recommendation for the intro to TCM, not the I Ching. I think Terrence McKenna's "Lanscapes of Time" would be a good one for the I Ching. And of course Sabbadini/Ritsema (The Eranos I Ching). West, to a Chinese contemporary of Qui Chanchun's, meant "India." I think it would be interesting to explore compass attractions/repulsions within Chinese culture -- all the South-North polarities ("rice eaters" vs "noodle eaters") and all the East-West ebb and flow... but that grad paper would probably take a millennium to complete. "Monkey" would be the easy way out I guess. Lingbao Bifa I only know in oral transmission, so I don't even know if I'm missing anything that can be found in the book. I have held the Chinese version in my hands but I won't be ready to read it in a while... and my French is practically nonexistent. If you can do a translation instead of a grad paper?..

Sorry kid, I've no use for Rockefeller-funded science.

Apologies if I misunderstood what "little meaning" meant in your context. Meanings are so elusive in the virtual world! Yes, I've wondered about the origin of taoism (by the way, you can do that via insight, research, contemplation, and integration -- but not via direct experience, alas), and have come to the conclusion that when the world was simple (no such thing in the past 200,000 years or we wouldn't drive the mammoth and the neanderthal to extinction), no taoism was necessary. To pretend that what worked 250,000 years ago will still work today is exactly what the founders of taoism didn't do. I found stilling-the-mind practices very early and with no schooling, and did that for years. This, however, didn't do anything when the proverbial hit the fan. Apparently the capacity of a modern mind for stillness is commensurate with the magnitude of the incoming weather. That it can still the ripples is no indication that it will be as competent at stilling a tsunami. I have come to the conclusion that the reason for this is the glaring lack of stillness of the larger mind at work, humanity's mind. We are all connected. You can only still a part of a compartmentalized mind these days. (I don't mean you personally, I mean a generic "you".) But I'm after integration... I'm after unification of my mind... and on that road I'm finding the need for all kinds of tools (yes, I do use taoist tools, mostly) -- stillness and movement, experience and contemplation, "leaving the world" and "coming into the world," opening and closing, the simple and the complex... pretty much like my teachers. I have taoist teachers who are simple and complex, and generally I'm finding them very smart regardless of their level of academic learning (modest in some, encyclopedic in others). Very, very smart every possible way, including emotional intelligence, somatosensory intelligence (being able to express comlpex concepts with a gesture!) and overall-life intelligence (when one's life doesn't look "dumb" or "dull" from the outside nor is perceived as such from the inside). I just try to emulate as much as I can of the ways of my contemporary teachers, because if I were to emulate some hypothetical simple folks from the time and lifestyles I, in my current life, can only recreate on the street in my mind, I'd be nurturing a delusion, which is probably the single most widespread practice out there, far as I'm concerned. Oh, and I didn't mean you would be screwed if you didn't know your number, I meant just what I said -- I, me, would be. I have a very challenging Four Pillars wuxing layout, I have to approach qi consciously or I'll be screwed... Not the case with everybody. Some people can afford to not know and still be OK, but I can't. Nice talking to you, by the way, I really like your style of expression.

I do appreciate the appreciation of the part you liked, you can't imagine how much it means to me when someone somewhere understands me sometimes... ...but you haven't mentioned Xuan Kong feng shui or Chinese astrology among your wonderful practices... so about the part that you assert had "little meaning" I think it would be considerably more fair if you said you didn't understand what I meant instead... You mentioned studying the I Ching, forget Xuan Kong, do you Ta Chuan in your I Ching studies?.. OK, forget that, do you know the Taiji Songs? Do you know the Song of Thirteen? What do you think those Thirteen are, chopped liver?.. or the kinds of qi idiosyncratic to taijiquan? No sir... they are the eight of bagua interacting with the five of wuxing... So then how about the Ten Stems and Twelve Branches? What do you think they are? What about the Nine Flying Stars -- what do you think they are? Ever looked at Hetu and Luoshu? OK, forget Hetu and Luoshu. What do I do to get you to believe me? I can do the Circular I Ching from memory, like an idiot savant, but not because I'm either, merely because that was my meditation focus for years. I would be so screwed if I didn't know my number after this.

Yuan qi and jing are different ways to view the same thing. Jing usually refers to its personal aspect and yuan qi, to its transpersonal aspect. But the distinction is not physical or spiritual, it's more like different labels for "acetaminophen" and "Tylenol" -- same substance, two different ways to present it, one "generic," another one proprietary. What is affected by "acetaminophen" is affected by "Tylenol" quite the same way. Ditto with yuan qi and jing.

Ah, the anti-intellectual stance to deflect the horrible "elitist" injustice... the smart kid's defense against being ostracized as a "nerd" in junior high... how many folks never get over it. How many are afraid to know and are eager to embrace every paradigm that tells them there's something wrong with anyone using her brain... And, here's the punch line... how very un-taoist. Laoist, maybe. Though he was a scholar and an imperial librarian before he told everybody else (in a whole bunch of poor translations) that Ignorance is Bliss, just like Big Brother used to teach in 1984. Anyway... who am I to blow against the wind?.. Yes, Yuan Qi can be affected. Alchemy is nothing but a know-how manual as to how to affect that. Which is why it is useful to figure out what it is you're dealing with before affecting it or leaving it alone. I have TCM Materia Medica, way huge, but it's not serving as a support for a lamp, it's serving as a support for internal alchemy with external. There's herbs that affect yuan qi too, although technically most of them are animal material rather than plant but they call this whole non-pharma stuff "herbs," for simplicity (or rather simpletonity... everyone is supposed to be a simpleton, right?.. in order to be doing something useful?..) But online sources are full to the gills of "information" to the contrary. What can I do about it? Nothing. Who am I to blow against the wind?.. Oh, and just in case you might... don't ask me which "herbs" to use. I know which ones will affect MY yuan qi. I don't know which ones will affect yours. Figure it out if you decide to "affect" it.

And thank you, TzuJanLi. I worked as a technical translator for a bunch of years, it's a habit of mine to "translate." I don't believe in inaccessibility of any texts, only in poor translations. I occasionally edit other people's translations (Russian/English or vice versa) to this day, and I know that all translations are invariably poor unless the translator lives what the author is talking about... no way around it. So... no secret societies at work (well, these too, but that's a separate subject, and they are as often Chinese as Western and Zulu -- I've studied the secret societies of Haiti for a change of pace, and man, they are everywhere and every-when... but don't let me digress) -- in this particular case, we're merely dealing with the fallout of learning stuff from translators who are, in the best case scenario, scholars of taoism but who are not themselves taoists. I don't read those anymore... if I'm going to learn about taoism, I'm going to learn from taoists... if you're going to learn to drive a car, better make sure you're learning from a driver.

No one is stupid and no one is wrong, it's just the next bit of taoist study after the one you posted a link to. Your link outlines various aspects of postnatal qi, a Houtian (Later Heaven) phenomenon. Fine. Whereas I, in response to Little1's query, was talking about yuan qi -- that's prenatal qi, a Xiantian (Earlier Heaven) phenomenon. That's what we've been discussing ever since Little1's post of today. You are welcome to join in the discussion, but you would have to first find out what it's about. So now you have. Oh, and it's not about "westernizing" it. It's about understanding it with the mind you have, which is either a Western mind or a Westernized Chinese mind, invariably, these days. Have a nice practice!

No, it is not a separate number or position, it is the sum total of the rest of them, but not a mathematical sum. Qi either arises as a process or "contracts" into a potential. Yuan Qi is contracted into a potential inclusive of all possible processes. It is not part of the map, it is the connections between parts of the map. Say, you were to buy a ticket to come visit us in CA. You have your ticket in your pocket; that's your "yuan California qi." In and of itself it doesn't fly. But the ticket contains within itself your packing, your phone call for the cab, the cab ride to the airport, the plane, the pilots who were trained to fly it, your seat, your meal, your jetlag, and the rest of it, it's all in there, contracted into a potential. Should you lose the ticket, the plane will still be there, and CA will still be there, but you're not connecting. No, it refers to 8 types of qi, and the wuxing, to another 5, and yuan qi involves the combination of these combinations into the 10 Heavenly stems and 12 Earthly branches through the action of the 9 "primal" vibrations of the Nine Stars, or numbers, and don't forget the binary yin-yang codes therein. The math of yuan qi is complex. (See Ta Chuan, The Great Treatise on the Changes.) To find out more, all I have to offer is the route I've taken myself -- the indirect roundabout way. ("Nothing Chinese is ever straightforward.") Xuan Kong feng shui, TCM, taijiquan, and the I Ching were the applications I started with. Alchemy I didn't understand until I understood less ambitious applications. The trouble is, people (I don't mean you, it's my ongoing complaint in general) start at a level that is too metaphysical... I honestly don't know if one can jump straight to that level. Maybe, with transmissions from immortals. Maybe, with special talents. But I only know the route I've taken: simple to complex in a steady progression, with empirical applications, i.e. solving pragmatic problems with the tools of taoist arts and sciences. A good friend of mine who is quite knowledgeable and getting more so under very good guidance put it this way: "Cultivation is solving your problems, one by one, simple to complex." I am lost when people delve into the complex metaphysical level who skipped the simple level. If you can do the alchemical transformation of a bunch of TCM herbs to arrive at the kind of qi you're aiming at, that's mastering the simple level. (Might take a decade though to even know where to look for that level.) If you know straight away how to do that in your own body, you don't need any of that. But I didn't. It's very easy to do "something" in one's own body, and to feel another "something," and to "think" "something about it." It's very easy to buy a ticket "somewhere," and with metaphysical involvement, it's very easy to buy a ticket to the North Pole while planning to take a trip to Equador. You know you're on the North Pole when what you thought of as Equador turns out cold as hell, but in transition, you can't tell the difference. Taoist sciences and applications can help match this "something" one is capable of feeling and thinking to a connecting flight "somewhere you want to go." At least that's my understanding of the correlation between theory and practice. Yes, there is a progression, and it goes North---Southwest---East---Southeast---Center---Northwest---West---Northeast---South.

Much love to Izaac. Condolences to the family.

"UFOs And the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints," edited and with an Introduction by Michael Lindemann, 1991. The book is comprised of six chapters, each one an interview with a researcher of the subject. My library of the past few years has been gaining books from accidental encounters at thrift shops and library sales and the like, each one a book that has found me when it needed me. This one, well, I was listening to some modern ufologists on the Veritas Show (scope of subjects not unlike that of Coast to Coast but the host has a soft, academic, European-accented, deceptively unoffensive voice which lets him take on the most offensive subjects ever and get away with it without sounding like a card-carrying "conspiracy theorist" or a hired disinformer impersonating one) -- as I was saying, modern ones were mentioning names related to the history of the subject that weren't familiar to me, so I thought, I'd like to know who these people are... and the next day the book showed up at my trusty thrift shop next door. (I sometimes suspect aliens, gods, spirits, whoever, the watchers... use this particular thrift shop to throw stuff my way whenever they feel I'm ready for it. I found a beautiful and unique Buddha sitting doing Red Phoenix in that shop shortly after the first kunlun seminar, a gourd rattle when I felt like adding some shamanic stuff to my taoist altar, and so on... in addition to scores of books on subjects that I would get interested in that would show up the moment I get interested -- all at such low prices as to prevent me from thinking twice.)

Thank you!

Tell you what. If you told another member "you're full of shit" I'd be obligated to moderate it, but since you're telling it to me and I know for a fact that I'm not (try ayahuasca sometime, you will know how it is not possible to be "full of shit" while communicating with the true otherworldly powers -- if you are, you get the diarrhea of the century before you do ), I'll answer your question instead of nitpicking. No one informed me what the reason is. I suspect the reason is, it can't be any other way. Our texbooks is what's full of shit. Cutting edge astrophysicists who are less afraid than most to piss off their peers because of the strength of their position, scientific, intellectual or administrative, tend to assert these days that there's over a hundred million planets similar to Earth in their ability to maintain life in our galaxy alone. To believe we are unique and alone in the universe is the craziest fundamentalist paradigm anyone can think up. That it was being sold to so many for so long doesn't make it any saner. Remember, for 99% of our civilized history we lived on a flat Earth -- it was a scientific fact. I was just reading Edgar Cayce's biography that starts with an episode where a German-educated Harvard professor arrives at his place and announces that he's going to expose him. "What's the source of your purported ability?" he asks sarcastically. Cayce starts telling him something about the unconscious mind, the Harvard professor interrupts him with utmost contempt: "The story of the unconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none." And so it goes with our "modern science..." ...at all times. So I would say scientific sanity is a prerequisite for the rest of this discussion. Barring that, any square evidence will be forced into a round hole, and any well-rounded argument, into a square hole pre-cut in the mind of the indoctrinated for accommodating any and all new entries. Show me a mind with bars in the windows and locks on the doors -- and I will tell you who threw away the keys. But you have to have been let out of the prison to have seen that.

Oh, good luck with your project. I can't have the owl story "used" though, the child who is its protagonist grew up to become a taoist, which Zhuangzi defines as "useless." (There's a Zhuangzi story about an enormous tree, too twisted and gnarled and convoluted to be made into tables and chairs and chests of drawers, a tree no one can cut down because it is so weird it can't be used.)

I didn't see the movie, I saw the owl when I was 11, and I read about consistent and multiple reports of owls in alien encounters in a book published in 1991. I'm not going to watch the movie, I don't know if the book published in 1991 was the basis for what they put in a movie, and I don't know what the owl I saw was. All I know is, I didn't get the owl story from a movie. I don't jump to conclusions, and don't pay attention to statements along the lines of "aliens exist" or "aliens don't exist" or "greys are hostile" or "greys are peaceful" because people who make these statements are giving me nothing to work with. I don't take anyone's word for anything... I watch the patterns grow... once it grows you know what it was, that little green sprout, an alfalfa or a baobab.

No, I didn't take your post any more seriously than Ralis's. Sitcoms use canned laughter to make sure that everybody finds the same things funny at the same time. I haven't watched one in many years though... ...maybe that's why I find things funny when I find things funny -- not because they are not funny in general but because I, personally, may or may not laugh when expected/prompted to. Crack a joke, I might laugh, or I might cry -- I can't predict it myself. I saw an owl in a cave in the mountains of Kara-dag, Crimea, when I was 11. Maybe that's the reason I felt like telling a different story, one related to the title of the topic, rather than maintain the joke. Remind me to tell the owl story someday... if you ever feel you're done with humor and are ready for horror.

According to Budd Hopkins who researched the phenomenon for several decades and interviewed thousands of people who may have been in contact with the aliens, using the services of over a dozen licensed professionals (psychiatrists and psychologists trained in hypnotic regression and suppressed memory retrieval), aliens often install a "screen memory" to cover up for the real one. The suspicion that a memory may be false arises when there's lost time -- a few hours (or more, or less) that can't possibly be accounted for. The individual is not aware of having been missing, sometimes discovering the fact only because there's a frantic search for him that's been going on (as in numerous cases with missing military personnel, e.g.), and sometimes just not knowing how he got to point B where he finds himself after remembering just being at point A, sometimes many miles removed, and having no memory of having driven, walked, or otherwise covering the distance in between. Or they just look at the watch and see the road that they took to get from point A to point B which usually takes them one hour took three hours or some such, and they don't understand how or why. The last memory before the time lapse many people have in such cases is of having seen an animal. Budd Hopkins has discovered that it can be any kind of animal but four species are consistently repeated in the majority of cases -- owl, deer, wolf, and cow. That, in some of the suspicious cases, later proves to be the "screen memory." Sometimes no hypnotic regression is required, just sheer analysis of what it is exactly that the person remembers about the encounter that reveals its utter absurdity under the circumstances. There was even a humorous case he reported where a woman asserted that as she was driving on the highway, she saw a cow by the side of the road, the most beautiful, magnificent cow she had ever seen. The cow started running along, keeping up with her car (that was going at highway speed) all the while looking at the woman with big, dark, beautiful eyes radiating peace and love. In most cases, however, the encounter with one of these animals causes such terror as cannot be accounted for if the animal is real rather than a screen memory. E.g., a deer looking at someone through the bedroom window -- that's not very scary, deer is no predator -- but in the cases where something not quite right is going on, this can terrify a person into subsequent total disintegration, and it's cases like these that occasionally (on many occasions) yield a real memory behind the screen memory of the animal on closer examination. Of course ridicule of the kind just exhibited on this board stops 19 abductees out of 20 from ever telling anyone. They just suffer the horror alone.

According to WLP, normalcy. He asserts that this is the normal state of the natural human body to be aware and in control of the internal organs. In a modern human body, however, due to all the long-term abnormalities of upbringing and environment, these organs are sort of lumped together, stuck in an undifferentiated "porridge" as he put it, and the goal of the practice is to "unglue" them and restore one's freedom of perception and function.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should... who needs liver without onions?

I can only describe what I've seen. By the way, it wasn't done to impress, it was education -- one of the practices we were taught at the seminar is aimed at gaining control over your internal organs, and someone asked about the extent of this control physically -- is it just qi that moves or are we actually gaining control over "gross matter?" (As an aside, I always find it funny when people talk about qi this and qi that moving this or that orbit, but ask them to fan out their toes and they can't do that! As a French philosopher put it, "man creates gods by the thousand but hasn't yet succeeded in creating a worm." The gross material level is the litmus test of whether one is really moving one's qi in the body or "on the street in his mind," another one of my favorite quotes.) What it looked like was, WLP lifted his shirt, pointed to where the liver is, bulged it out, pulled it back in, bulged it out -- well, from the outside, you're just looking at something you have never seen a human body do in your entire life, that's what it looks like -- and then he lifted it up almost to the armpit and then dropped it down, and then asked a student to punch him in the liver, hard. The student punched, hit the spot but there was no liver in that spot by the time the punch landed, the liver was lifted up from under the blow. It was shown as an efficient internal organs protection technique in MA. Needless to say it was mind-blowing.

I don't have a video, but I swear I saw with my own eyes how Wang Liping moves his liver. I was standing a foot away.

The answers lie in history, as usual. As Little1 said, memory plays an important part in the universe. I would say memory IS the universe, or as the classics put it, "tao fa ziran," tao patterns itself on itself. Trace modern events to who started them, when, and how, and who got what out of them, and you will see that humans didn't do things the predatory way for most of our species' history. Nevermind what anyone said it was "for" when it started being done -- look at the actual outcome. There were forests; suddenly (always suddenly, I checked and double-checked) there was "clearing" of the forests and there were monoculture fields and fortified city walls and pyramids erected where forests used to be, and deserts where forests used to be, and "civilization," which we were told was a blessing. It must have been for someone... but not for the slaves. For the vast majority of the civilized human history, most humans (up to 97% at some places at some times) were slaves. And antislavery activists today assert that currently there's more slaves on this planet than there's ever been in the past. The pattern was started and got going, feudalism is no better than capitalism, nor worse -- the set-up is, you are born into a spider web of a society that ties you down -- if it's feudalism, by "lowly birth" which is the destiny of 97 percent of humans, if it's capitalism, by "unlimited opportunities" that somehow invariably boil down to working the longest hours for a lifetime, getting nothing out of life except for things advertised on TV, and believing that more of those things would make you happy and fewer of those things, should you lose your income, make you unhappy. And war, always, at all times, no peaceful stretch anywhere on earth not accompanied by bloodshed somewhere far or near. And epidemics of diseases that never happened in a million years of the species history and then all of a sudden they are happening. And "health care" that you are told is your salvation, and all those "saved" people dragging themselves in and out of doctors' offices for more salvation, for a good part of their lives preoccupied with aches and pains and failing bodily functions and working to pay for the fix that never fixes anything for longer than the next appointment, in the best case scenario. And deforestation never stops. The planet never stops turning into more and more of a poisonous desert with machines growing and animals and plants and human souls shrinking. I used to think we are doing this to ourselves. But not anymore. I can't point out any one source, mother of all sources, to corroborate what I think now. It's been years of slowly opening my eyes, physical and non-... But, like I said, go to history, start to compare what started happening where and when that wasn't happening before, disregard the explanations you were offered in school as to how good and wonderful it was for the human race that it happened, how "progress" is the shit, and look at the pattern from, um, wuxing perspective... Fire and Metal assaulting Water and Wood is what you will see, and Earth with all its inhabitants will be clearly seen as the "beneficiary" of this treatment... and it used to not be.

Thanks, I didn't mean you were, I meant the overlords who try to manipulate my (and everyone else's) emotions.

It would be truly horrible. "They" are working on it though... and "I" resist with all I've got.

No, this is supposed to illustrate that being interested in these things is no indicator of the interested party being an idle time waster (which was the original premise). By the same token, being interested in these things is no indicator of the interested party being an efficient utilizer of time. Overall meaning: total value of the information about someone being interested in these things for predicting or presuming the rest of their behaviors is zero.