Taomeow

You are trying to shame a European into WWII awareness to accomplish what exactly? More than half of my family died under those very circumstances. I don't see how my refusal to look for patterns in seemingly random events could have prevented it. People who died on 9/11 died in exactly the same numbers they die in car accidents on American highways every single day, 365 days a year, every year. I notice a pattern when my compassion is steered away from 365 times the number of victims yearly toward a specific selected group I am supposed to care about more, while any and all other groups suffering and dying for any and all other reasons are supposed to bypass my awareness altogether. I notice when the pattern is "manipulation of my awareness." I notice when the pattern is "manipulation of my emotions." I notice when the pattern is "manipulation of the public awareness and public emotions toward condemning any non-sanctioned awareness and non-government-prescribed emotion." I keep noticing patterns... and I notice that my humanity grows when I do, and shrinks when I don't. Is it just me?.. Have you ever tried to look at it this way?.. And finally, I didn't say anything happening on the human level was "just" "part of some cosmic pattern." Noticing a pattern doesn't equal noticing "just" the pattern. I am very much aware of the human level of any "pattern," I just can't help noticing more than unrelated disjointed "random events" -- I notice connections between them, and that's what I believe is the human thing to do in order to support life-friendly patterns and not the death-dispensing ones. Why substitute a statement never made for one actually made, and argue against that?..

Thanks for sharing. We seem to be sailing the troubled waters of our economy in similar boats. My business got hit too. Lights in the sky -- I know nothing about their significance. I saw a UFO but it could have been what one researcher calls Unidentified Fascist Observatories. I was going to post a poll asking people how many think they may have been abducted by aliens, but the poll feature is not currently operational. Just as well. I don't know about Tibet and NM. I do know that in Russia they studied "geopathological" and the opposite (don't remember what they called them, beneficial) land formations with government grants money, and whoever looked into that takes these things quite seriously. There's all kinds of energy grids, magnetic, tectonic, mysterious... I use feng shui to evaluate them, the grid is Luoshu-derived, but sacred-geometrical patterns superimpose on that with ease. Predatory capitalism is a trickle-down problem from a bigger one we have, methinks.

When I don't get what people mean, I usually ask, "what do you mean?" All discussions along the lines of "I don't get it, therefore you are off" are always the same. All discussions along the lines of "I don't get it, but I'm curious to find out what you are seeing" are always different. I don't get what people get out of the first type of discussions. Would you please explain it to me? When I first came to the US, the Twin Towers were quite a noticeable presence in New York where I lived, and the first thing I asked when I first saw them was, "why did they erect the humongous number 11 in the middle of the navel of the world, taller and more conspicuous than anything else?" The question was never answered till 9/11. What does a double 11 mean? Nothing... everything... depends on the context it occurs in. If life is a lesson, the name of the class is "pattern recognition." I don't feel like failing the very subject I'm here to learn, is all.

too late, I saw it, and I remember. It was pretty cool. The benefits -- more fluid moistening the joints and bones etc. -- are a classic Increase Yin scenario, textbook. Since you described bright light and heat conductive to these beneficial changes, apparently you succeeded in gathering yang and transforming it into "true yin," aka yuan qi, aka jing, aka "returning shen to the body." Which is exactly what you want to do regardless of the terminology and ideology. It's just my personal thing to try to match actual reality events to taoist terminology used in the classics to "identify" their various aspects. Ideally this should aid communication and understanding. A TCM practitioner, e.g., will immediately sort the symptoms someone presents with into yin and yang, and successful treatment is predicated on his or her knowing what the classic medical texts describe as "yin" and what they describe as "yang," and if the practitioner's own nomenclature is for whatever reason different from that of the Materia Medica, he or she will mis-prescribe. In feng shui, similarly, you want to know if you're dealing with yin or yang dynamics for sure, or you will use for the living what best suits the dead, and vice versa. Now in neidan, it may not be that important to identify the players by name, because the game is inside you and you can use any nicknames you like for the members of your favorite team. It's like a family where the wife would address her husband as "Mrs. Smith" for shits and giggles, and the husband respond by calling the wife "Mr. Smith." They are still a man and a woman, and what they call each other can't change their anatomy and physiology. At least not to the extent that the husband will become pregnant, should one of them conceive.

So in one fell swoop you strike down synchronicity, sacred geometry, and aliens. Good job. Since you wonder what people are doing with their time, I can give you a few examples. Budd Hopkins, the main force behind collecting thousands of alien abduction testimonials, is spending the rest of his time being a highly successful artist with work on permanent display at major museums of the world, including the Metropolitan and Guggenheim. Nassim Haramein, the sacred geometry dude, is spending his time being a highly successful physicist lecturing at major universities of the world and publishing his work in peer-reviewed journals. Drunvalo Melchizedec, the 11:11 guy, is being a stylistically impaired but rather successful writer and a new age flake in this incarnation, though this alone would probably be nowhere near enough to get him invited to all major cross-cultural shamanic events whenever and wherever they take place anywhere on Earth, climbing mountains in the Andes, crawling into the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, and so on, which is how he spends his time. What about you? What are you doing with your time?

You too?

I think "pure yang energy in a latent state" has a traditional name... it is called "yin." As for what can be experienced... I guess it depends on who is experiencing. I discovered dantien breathing accidentally in my early teens, no information, just a spontaneous find... and shortly thereafter I fell in love, and the guy was throwing a party at his place, so I came and he opened the door and all of a sudden an abyss of infinite darkness opened right where what I was to learn years later my "lower dantien" is, and from the periphery of my bodymind everything started falling into that abyss at a speed of light. That's the best I can put it. "Burning hot bright light" has its yin soulmate, and the latter has all the characteristics of space and none of energy. "Burning" refers to energy, there was no burning, there was churning -- of space within -- of the nature and intensity that twists galaxies into spirals. "Hot" refers to energy, there was no energy, there was a helpless collapse into infinity with nothing energy-wise to stop it. "Bright light" refers to energy, there was no brightness, there was the darkest mystery, darkest of dark, mystery of mysteries. Energy has its counterpart -- space. You fall into that space, or rather you turn into that space, energy and all, everything collapses into dark infinity churning galaxies on its way in and out of existence. At least that's what I felt. Me neither.

Definitely that post was infused with something. Even what's left of it still is. Tree qigong did it?.. Sheesh, I've been neglecting it... I had a rather barren year practice-wise all around, ODed on universe-shattering experiences the year before and all of a sudden turned into the proverbial donkey starving between two -- in my case, three -- stacks of hay. Getting back on track though...

Exactly. When I was in China, I immediately stopped paying attention to those rows of numbers (by the way, only three in a row or more have qi significance in such contexts, two don't count) because I realized that what's going on is not ganying but a superstitious use of some vestigial cultural knowledge of its workings: all advertisements of any products big enough to have a billboard or to use a side of the truck as such list phone numbers that go, 999-9999 or 333-3333 and so on, and license plates, and whatever anyone numbers when having a choice, they try to number in this manner. For luck. But because it is human doing, not tao's doing, it may bring luck to the user of this row of numbers (if chosen wisely and competently, that is, which I doubt -- modern China is not really a land of taoist sciences' ubiquity) but is meaningless to a chance observer of same. It became obvious to me right away, on the stretch of the road from the airport within my first hour in Xi'an, after seeing scores and scores of those, that they are to be disregarded. Not so here in CA, where if it occurs for me, it occurs for me as tao's doing, not human doing. So of course I will pay attention to tao's antics. I dare not superimpose my own will and pretend it's just me doing this. Tao might take it with a grain of salt if I were to assume that whatever happens, I do it, that I'm the only doer and the Way and its Power has to just sit and wait and see what I might be doing with my mind and my subconscious and what not. The hubris!..

Ahh, the human mind, whatsoever shall be done to math and probability with this merciless weapon, they will have to grin and bear... look, we have, within ONE HOUR, ONE occurrence of 11:11 and FIFTY-NINE occurrences of non-11:11. We are not talking catatonic watchers of watches, we are talking a chance glance once in a while or once a day or once in a blue moon or whenever the need to know the time arises once within any one hour or any 24 hour period. We are talking normal humans, no clock-watching OCD, who see 11:11 every day, for weeks, months, years on end -- with the chance of seeing it accidentally being ONE in SIXTY every time. If you were offered surgery and told that your chances of surviving it are 1:60, meaning out of every 60 people getting this surgery 59 die and 1 gets better, you would realize immediately how slim a chance you would be taking if you agree to that surgery. How crazy in fact. If you were making an investment and told that there's one chance in sixty that you will get your money back with a profit, that one out of every sixty investors does while fifty-nine lose their money, you would probably think twice, thrice, fifty-nine times in the negative against making that investment. It's just very, very, very low odds to bet on. And yet when it happens in the positive, coincidence theorists shrug it away -- no big deal, coincidence. Yeah. But a very very slim chance pans out for this coincidence to perpetuate itself. It's like a group of people making that 1:60 investment every day and one and the same person profits every day while 59 other investors lose their money every day... wouldn't you suspect something is up with that?..

Oh, I see what you mean. Do you think they are different practices though? The goals may be different -- some people use taijiquan for health, but it's just an aspect of use -- it can be a health routine, a MA, a meditation, an immortality practice, or even the practice engaged in by the immortals. Ditto healthy sex. Bedchamber arts are similar -- what you make of them can be Dual Cultivation for immortality, or meditation, or a MA (sic), or a health routine. There's a taoist story of a young woman who served wine and food at a roadside tavern somewhere remote, and one day an inconspicuous, "plainclothes" old man who spent the night there left behind a book before proceeding on his way into the mountains. She opened the book and discovered it was a manual on the bedchamber arts of taoism. She studied it and started using it -- she would serve a customer some wine, strike up a conversation, and then take him to her bed and practice. Fast forward sixty years. The same old man comes from the mountains and sees the woman, recognizing her at first glance because, well, she hadn't changed at all -- she still looks 18, so he immediately realized what happened. He burst out laughing. When he was done laughing, he told her, "So you have wings now... but without a teacher, even if you have wings, how can you learn to fly?.." He took her by the hand and off to the mountains they went. So I think the difference is just this -- you can get more than just health out of the bedchamber arts, but you get Dual Cultivation if you have TWO taoists engaged in the practice of the bedchamber arts.

Exactly!

No, to Xian Tian, Earlier Heaven, tao-in-stillness, wuji, Hetu, the unmanifest state, prenatal state. As opposed to Hou Tian, tao-in-motion, taiji, Luoshu, the manifest state, postnatal state. What do you mean?

This happened today... I decided to make a coffee stash, because there's rumors the price will go steeply up soon. (I have reasons to believe these rumors because the price of coffee usually mimics the dynamics of the price of gold. Real things, rather than toys, are the best predictors of economic developments... but don't let me digress.) So I went to Trader Joe's which has good coffee for half the price of elsewhere, and got ten cans of whole beans. I also bought a few routine items and proceeded to checkout. Then I saw a shorter line at a different one and maneuvered my cart in that direction, but simultaneously some other shopper saw it and decided to beat me to it, so she pushed her cart vigorously and suddenly, and jammed it into mine, whereupon one of the coffee cans balanced on top fell off. It fell strategically onto my big toe, orienting itself so as to get me at the base of the toenail with the metal edge. It's only 14 ounces so it surprised me that it nearly amputated a phalanx hitting it at this angle. It started bleeding and it hurt to the point of absurdity. I clenched my teeth stoically and presented my cart to the guy behind the counter. He started unloading and said, of course, Oh, you really like coffee! I said, I did till a minute ago, not anymore. Why? I explained why. He produced some napkins and a band-aid, showed every concern, and finally told me he won't charge me for the offending can of coffee, he'll give me the sucker for free. The resulting bill? $77.77. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwbtQWub7Zs

H, I didn't mean for my comments to come across as "criticism," and I don't necessarily have more theoretical knowledge, I merely have a different kind of knowledge, and a different understanding. What I was trying to convey is that there's a difference between a concept you hold because someone says so, and one you arrive at because it makes sense within the overall paradigm of taoist sciences. Many teachers (who are no teachers of mine though) will equate yin with all kinds of "impure" states, but it simply doesn't compute if you go to the taoist fundamentals. It computes as an ideology that serves certain interests, but it does not compute as a taoist science. I believe I've learned to separate the former from the latter, at least to an extent... I was trying to share some of my methods and sources for doing this, that's basically the gist of it.

Thanks so much for sharing. Pity the public forum is not the best place to discuss delicate matters in more depth, I'd love to know more. If you're up to it, I'll listen. If not, I'll take your word for "a whole new dimension" though I don't know what dimension that is. The single weirdest sexual dimension I ever visited was at the bottom of a waterfall... a real physical waterfall, we were in the mountains and accidentally fell in. Would you be able to make any kind of connection between your wonderful experience and the idea that the primal state (and a state to gear cultivation toward) is pure yang? My main objections were against this concept, and it is extremely widespread, extremely, which makes it so much more difficult to argue against... But bubble gum is even more widespread... things widely popularized are not automatically true and genuine. Bubble gum ain't no caviar. Pure yang ain't no goal of original taoist cultivation. I can't prove it to anyone who has been massively exposed to the opposite belief... but there's no harm in trying.

Intercourse at a distance with clothes on and with pure yang as the goal... sounds like something monks may have come up with who were forbidden to have actual sex... A woman in such an intercourse is optional, since it's all about pure yang... sounds like a homoerotic fantasy more than anything else. The "woman moves, man doesn't" tip I posted is related to actual taoist bedchamber arts that involve Xian Tian energies. Again we have to remember that Xian Tian refers to the prenatal condition. In the prenatal condition... sheesh, you have to have been pregnant to get it.

OK, thanks for a chance to put some meat on the bare bones of "concepts" and "beliefs," Hagar. Understood -- in which case it is your teacher I disagree with, not you. All my teachers, with the exception of one who was from Siberia and one who was American but had teachers from China, are Chinese and were taught in China and, some of them, have always lived in China and still do. I'm mentioning this just in case... so as to take the China syndrome out of the equation. OK, this is where I disagree. The hexagram analogies used anywhere are derived from the I Ching, the I Ching views yang as the male principle and yin as the female principle, and the only situation where one would say they have nothing to do with gender is a situation where one wants to hide the fact that the ideology that is yang-centered is male-centered and present it as neutral. But the man has a solid line and the woman has an open line. We embody the lines of the hexagrams. We are microcosms. We have yin and yang lines embedded in our anatomy and physiology. "The primal state is pure yang" is something I disagree with completely and utterly. This line of thinking was introduced into some schools of taoism, the ones heavily influenced by buddhism, but not others. There is absolutely nothing in the taoist-proper sources (the Taoist Canon) to indicate that the primal state is pure yang. It is quite explicitly not the case if you examine and compare the Hetu and Luoshu diagrams, the Xian Tian bagua, even give a read to Laozi for that matter... All "pure yang" dissipates as pure borrowings if you look at the taoist originals. That's the thing. Shen is yang compared to jing (aka yuan qi) -- compare thoughts and ideas to DNA and sexual fluids, compare your neocortical memory of the previous sentence to your systemic memory of your species' evolution... that's your shen vs. jing. Shen is on the surface; jing runs deep. Shen is what jing transforms into when you merely let it take its course... jing to shen is the way of dissipation and dispersion, is DNA to Dr. Shen, Ph.D.. to the grave. So it's not a yin state that indicates death. It's a state of running out of yin. The way you run out of yin is via transformation of yin into yang (tao's business as usual), jing into shen. Death would have been a yin state if we only believed in the physical body as the beginning and end of life. Then indeed a dead body would be as yin an outcome as it gets. But the body is not the whole story. The spirit, Shen! -- that flies up and away, no? That persists and perseveres after death, or else what are we talking about, right? So what state are we in when shen leaves the body?.. Well, a dead state, aka pure yang. Death is what happens when you turn all your yin into yang. If we identify "me" with "my dead body," yes. If we don't, no. That's the thing... all yin lines do not indicate either illness or death -- they indicate an abundance of yin, yin that does not act in the outside world, yin that does not act not because someone filled with it to capacity is dead but because she is a fetus in the womb. All hidden, all Xian Tian, all full of ever-growing potential, all yin. Carried by a woman (has something to do with the female gender... traditionally yin-associated, no?). An introduction of a yang line into this situation displaces one yin line. When they all get displaced, blood will be spilled which, according to the I Ching's all-yang hexagram, is "red and yellow." These colors are symbolic of life in the taoist tradition -- well, red is obvious, blood proper, and yellow ("gold") is the color of the Gold Elixir of Immortality, of the Yellow Sprouts Field (aka lower dantien), of the Yellow Court (the site of taoist alchemical endeavors) -- in other words, the symbol of yuan (gold) qi. So in the taoist proper tradition, all yang signifies losing blood and yuan qi... losing life. Whew... thanks for being with me this far.

You mean he was into ayahuasca?.. Anyway, unicorns don't originate with Disney, and neither do mermaids, griffons, phoenixes, kirins, dragons, or any of the other animals recorded by Chinese bureacracy and reported to the imperial court at least as recently as the Tang dynasty, to say nothing of earlier periods. Making up such encounters or presenting them in the absence of several corroborating eyewitnesses was punishable by death, by the way, since the emperor based political and military decisions on these sightings. They were taken seriously, and China became a serious power. Still is...

Well, while we're waiting for Exorcist's explanation, here's a little bit from my own sources: the woman moves, the man doesn't.

Einstein believed in unicorns though. "Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

mjj, I'm sorry I deleted your entry from my personal forum without so much as arguing with you, but it so happens that arguing with you bores me, so I decided against it and chose an easy way out, which is what a personal forum is for -- to have a shield which a public forum may not provide. At the main forum, people have to wait for mod action until someone insults someone. At a personal forum, however, all they need to wait for is to get bored, and voila... no subject to discuss. To those who are listening in on the insinuations: mjj accused me of "deleting posts I disagree with," so for information purposes I make it known that I do not, in TTB mod capacity, delete anything from the main forum, ever, with the exception of my own posts (if I've changed my mind before someone has responded to them.) Turns out he didn't know or didn't care that personal practice forums are moderated by persons practicing writing in their own forum, so I moderated his post away from my personal practice forum as the mod of Taomeow's Personal Practice Forum, not as the mod of TTB. I winked at him here because in that exterminated post he accused me of exactly the thing he just did here (praising someone by putting down everyone else). Guess I overestimated his sense of humor once again. My bad. As for YM: I do not deny someone his or her merit merely because we seldom see eye to eye. Over and out (I hope... mjj, this really, really bores me, so I really, really hope you're done with the issue, if not, take it to PM, OK? -- let's not bore everyone else). Apologies all around for a boring post.

TheSongsofDistantEarth, well, I'm married to a mathematician who works for a Wall Street company and is exposed to all manner of probabilistic processes on a daily basis. I never studied grad school level math or physics, but they used to be topics of our leisurely conversations for years, and I got many (hundreds, if not thousands) top notch lectures in both subjects, so my knowledge of these areas is very patchy but neither trivial nor nonexistent. I assure you that there are other explanations than "probability" and "noticing" (by the way, "noticing" or not is something that has little to do with math), e.g. for a practitioner of Xuan Kong feng shui, an I Ching diviner, a Chinese astrology reader, a chaos-fractals-power laws dabbler, a fuzzy-logic student, a transmissions recipient, a taoist magic practitioner, etc. -- and I would have to mark "all of the above and more" if asked what I've been exposed to in terms of non-curricular math -- there's a helluva lot more reasons to pay attention to numbers and their behavior in real life than new agey flakiness you propose. This doesn't mean that new agey flakes can't jump to unwarranted conclusions based on mere coincidence. But let it be known that coincidence theorists jump to as many flaky conclusions themselves, on closer examination. Been there established that.

Nice to see you enjoy YM's posts. I think his merits can stand on their own, no need to prop them up by putting down the rest of the TTB community.