Taomeow

That's very possible. Although Rasputin was not really a member of his class, and before he got accepted at the imperial court, he got rejected by his fellow peasants. A shaman of great power belongs up there, higher than any aristocracy -- or else nowhere. Of course Yusupov hated him obsessively, and there may be all kinds of reasons for that... Why do people hate people? I've heard thin girls say they hate fat girls, and vice versa. Go figure, pun intended...

I forgot to mention that the Eranos I Ching, the crowning jewel of all translations (even for a native Chinese speaker, since it gives all historic meanings of all words used in the original, something a native speaker won't otherwise know), which was co-authored by a theoretical physicist, translates all-yin-lines as "space" and all-yang-lines as "energy."

Yeah, I get it, I wasn't arguing with you, I was arguing with the author of the book you referenced, and the rest of his camp.

Hi Mel, yes, it happens to me all the time. Used to not to, and then it started happening. And, yes, it started with 11:11 on digital clocks, but it didn't stop there. I started doing something differently, and it started happening. What I did differently was stop being a smartass know-it-all who "knows" that "this" is "silly superstitions" and instead became humble, assumed I don't know shit about how tao dispenses her signs, and started paying attention to same, getting more and more aware -- putting all interpretations on hold for the time being -- and just paying attention... It's like starting a relationship... You see 11:11, you shrug and think nothing of it, it's like you see a guy (or a girl, in the opposite-sex scenario) look at you trying to catch your attention and shrug him (her) away... the person interested in you will get the message "I'm not interested in you" and will drop it and won't try to get to know you, seeing you are not into him/her. So is tao! But if you look back and smile, this person might try to get to know you, strike up a conversation... So is tao! And if the conversation reveals mutual interests, you might get closer, see each other again... So is tao!

Well, all yin lines don't equal death in the I Ching -- the hexagram they form is "The Receptive, Earth." Pretty much equals "life." A very auspicious hexagram all around. By the same token, all yang lines don't equal "life" in the I Ching -- the hexagram they form is "The Creative, Heaven." Lots of references to fighting dragons therein, to spilled blood, and the final outcome of this pure yang situation is "an arrogant dragon will have reasons for regrets." A warning against getting too yang-skewed all around. Yuan qi is yin, incidentally, compared to postnatal qi and shen. The situation of a fetus in the womb is a yin situation, not a yang situation. The practice you are describing sounds good -- a yin practice aimed to replicate the situation of the fetus in the womb. All practices geared toward restoring yuan qi are like that.

Thanks for noticing!

Well, at one point I started collecting groceries sales slips that amounted to $55.55, $66.66 and so on, bills for $222.22, appointment addresses at 111 First Street, and so on and so forth. I was at it for a couple of months only but my collection was swelling up so fast -- weekly de riguer and often daily -- that I abandoned the whole thing. If I'm programming my subconscious to run particular utilities bills with precision to a cent, it must be one hell of a subconscious and I must be one hell of a programmer thereof. Also I must be programming other people's subconscious too, because if I dine out with one or two or more other people, I have to program theirs so that their own food choices plus mine together amount to one of these checks comprised of repetitive numbers. If my subconscious is that great, why am I not rich?.. I think any and all explanations of things not understood via things we erroneously believe we do understand (like, e.g., "the subconscious") are merely a sign of low tolerance, on our part, of things we can't control. We can't handle the idea that such things exist, are often in our face, more often than not in fact... so we substitute the true mystery with the false explanation... and everything appears to be under control again, and this tale of being in control we keep telling ourselves is the only state of existence we can handle. Nevermind that this sense of being in control is defensive and false. Long as we are not asked to coexist with the inexplicable, we are the champions... of denial and self-deception, of course, but the champions none the less.

Yes, I've seen it, and it was indeed most entertaining, and I love Gong Li! however, the source of my information was not the movie but the biography of Emperor Kangxi I read a bunch of years ago. He wrote poetry, among other things, and the book cited his poem dedicated specifically to this subject -- I remember the line about no need for the timekeeper announcing the hour anymore.

In the taoist tradition, the mind actually originates in the heart, not in the head. The situation when it becomes disconnected from the heart is viewed as pathological. In a healthy individual, the heart and the mind are not in a conflict, and they are not disconnected. To pitch one against the other is not part of the taoist tradition at all. So a taoist who is intelligent and knowledgeable is thought of as manifesting a good heart, and one who is kind and compassionate is perceived as smart, and someone who is "bu ren," numb and unfeeling, is perceived as dull regardless of the extent of learning. Any inner conflict between "smart" and "kind," heart and mind, is a sign of disconnection, blockage, stagnation, or other shen disharmony. Modern upbringing creates this disharmony left and right, but it is not the norm. The norm is, when the heart is, as you say, open, its energy being Fire, the Light of this fire naturally goes upward to illuminate the mind, and that's where a bright mind really comes from. If you block the path, all the light in the mind will be artificial, i.e. relying exclusively on external sources. But assuming that any light of any bright mind is in some kind of conflict with the heart is quite the opposite of the actual healthy scenario.

Bringing a clock of a new design into a home brings in a different kind of energies and a different kind of perceptions of same. The larger the home, the greater the difference. Emperor Kangxi introduced European clocks to China in the 17th century, abolishing timekeepers who used to shout, "This is the hour of the Black Yin Rat! Peaceful Water rules this hour! Sleep well!" and so forth, first from the Forbidden City and then... ... then three hundred years of humiliating and devastating foreign rule followed, and China was never the same. You were never the same either after your father brought that clock, come to think of it... am I right?

It's really difficult to discern the truth about Rasputin because 99% of all the information demonizing the man was derived from publications by the main player in the assassination, both the creator of the conspiracy and the hands-on killer, Prince Felix Yusupov. Of course he presented his victim in the most unfavorable light possible. I researched the story a bit, a while ago... The feud appears to be ancient... The Yusupovs were one of the richest families in the world, and Prince Felix, an Oxford-educated handsome transvestite and tennis champion, was at one point the richest man in Russia (with the exception of the czar, whose niece, Irina, he married.) They made their fortune centuries before by exploiting Siberia, dealing in land and fur trade. Rasputin comes from the part of Siberia subdued by the Yusupovs way back at the time of Genghis Khan (one of the Yusupovs ancestors, but not the earliest one -- they trace their origins to the prophet Mohammed). Assassination and political manipulation was the family tradition for centuries... The Genghis Khan connection is matrilineal, via Sumbeki, a daughter or a granddaughter (don't remember exacty) who married the guy who killed her first husband and then the guy who killed her second one, then apparently killed the third husband herself. Prince Felix may have resented Rasputin as competition, among other things, because he was the official pretty boy of the empire, and some unkempt peasant having success with the very aristocratic gals who were supposed to be his very own fans must have been intolerable. Rasputin, in the meantime, was one of those folks in Siberia who retained access to "the old ways," shamanic ways some of which appear to be proto-taoist and proto-tantric, in particular the ones that include the practice of communal bedchamber arts. One of the first things that was done by Russia's new government in Siberia after the revolution was to kill all local shamans they could find. "The old ways" have been under murderous attack from all directions for quite a while... so I would take with a huge grain of salt any and all "information" "denouncing" any and all of them...

The tiger is a loner. No family, no friends. When the time comes, the tigress will seek and find sex, and kick the cat-man out the moment she's done. The kittens will be raised with love and care, but once they've been taught how to hunt, she will kick them out too. The lion is a family man. He will find a wife and stay with her for life, but if he can he will find two or three or four and stay with them all. The lionesses, far from being jealous of each other, form a sisterhood and hunt together with supreme cooperation, share fairly, and never fight with their cat-man or each other. The kids will be kept around till they are old enough to start families of their own, all lionesses will take care of them, not just the mother, once their paternity has been confirmed (if they are not the cat-man's kids, he will eat them, but won't say a word of reproach to the mother.) The "domestic cat" can adopt the tiger behavior or the lion behavior depending on the situation she finds herself in, or her very own. In Bermuda, I've seen large societies of feral cats forming communities and living communal lives. On Discovery Channel, I saw a documentary of a guy in England, a dairy farmer, who has a community of hundreds of cats around his farm living as a social, cultural, interrelated whole. They are free-roaming cats, and free-roaming cats don't choose loneliness. But a "pet" will often be alone. Now do you know about primates?..

Let's apply formal logic: Thesis: Those who speak do not know. Laozi spoke. Therefore, "those who speak" includes Laozi. Antithesis: Those who know do not speak. Laozi spoke. Therefore, "those who know" excludes Laozi. Synthesis: Laozi doesn't know. This practice of sending one's mind on a merry-go-round of a paradox was popular among Greek sophists. Compare: "A man from Crete asserts that all men from Crete are liars. Is he telling the truth?" The purpose is akin to a koan's too: discover the limitations of linear logic by applying it to nonlinear statements. So if you analyze the above Laozi line any further, beyond discovering that all Laozi said there amounts to "I don't know what I'm talking about," what is it you're doing?.. Are you using a 2D drawing of a screwdriver on a piece of paper to tighten a 3D screw that has come loose on your chair?.. Careful, you're gonna fall off that chair... Are you watering a rose bush in your back yard with a picture of a garden hose which you wave around it? Poor rose bush... it's going to die. Are you pouring gas into the tank of your car from a drawing of a canister of gas on a piece of paper?.. You can only drive this car on the street in your mind. Such is philosophy, my friends. Also sprach Taomeow.

Wazzup with the red herring? I am very much intrigued. I hereby solemnly declare that I have never deleted your posts, or anyone else's, from the main forum, with the exception of my own and "double post" clean-ups. Of course I delete with extreme prejudice whatever I choose to at Taomeow's Personal Practice forum, as Taomeow the moderator of Taomeow's Personal Practice forum. In my TTB mod capacity, I don't delete stuff. Moreover, I'm the one who's been consistently pushing for openness of mod actions, choosing public announcements of warnings or suspensions over PMs, basically opening myself to attacks in this manner but doing this out of a deep-seated aversion to secrecy in any power/control application for whatever purposes without the receiving end knowing who applies this power and why. This excludes me as the offender and leaves me and everyone else in a state of suspense. Whodidit?

"Which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has hit the mark." -- Vladimir Nabokov

I know! People who crave simplicity (and who doesn't, in our overcomplicated age?) should stay away from taoism, which is a simplicity-complexity paradox... Existence can, and probably should, be very, very simple, but it blatantly isn't for a "civilized" human. Hence taoism, a method and a map to use in order to return to simplicity -- not by condemning complexity or going into denial about its blatant existence (e.g. calling it an illusion... duh... as though it has ever helped anyone who ever stubbed a toe -- let alone a life...) -- but by mastering it, getting on top of it... If you are competent, things you are competent in are simple. So taoism is an attempt to get competent in what matters -- time, space, destiny -- in little increments of practice, study, cultivation... Every one single taoist step is really, really simple. If one doesn't skip steps, one might not even notice the complexity that had arisen ten thousand li down the road, because each step was just one step... simple and easy. The void is our oyster! Well, OK, tao gives birth to one, as the classic put it. "One of what?" you would ask in any other situation, e.g. if I told you "I have one" without specifying any further, you would invariably ask, "you have one what?" If I said, "I gave one," you would ask, "One what?" And so on... Millions, perhaps billions of eyes have skipped over this line without noticing that "one" is the actual object of birth, and you don't ask "one what" anymore than you would if you were told "tao gives birth to a child" or "Mary gives birth to Jesus" or "Socks gives birth to a litter of kittens." You don't ask "a child of what," "Jesus of what," "a litter of kittens of what?" A child is a child, Jesus is Jesus, a litter of kittens is a litter of kittens -- they are not abstractions (except I'm not sure about Jesus, but the grammar of "Mary gives birth to Jesus" presupposes he is a real human being, maybe the son of god or maybe just a random kid named Jesus somewhere in Colombia where the name is popular...) So, tao gives birth to one is a statement of exactly the same nature. One is real. It is not an abstract way to count one of something; it is the concrete One, tao's child. One, having so far been empirically instructed by his mom only in one thing -- how one gives birth to One -- does the same thing and that's how One gives birth to Two, by replicating itself. That's how ------ becomes ---- ---- and that's why one, the odd number, is yang, the solid line, and two, the even number, is yin, the broken line. The broken line is not so much broken as open -- out of the self-replicating Ones, Two arises, united onto itself, into a Two, by an empty opening into new possibilities.... ...are you with me so far?..

Since CowTao wasn't part of this discussion, I will assume you mean Taomeow, and you're very welcome. It is used very extensively in taoist arts and sciences. In the taoist "as above so below" cosmology, the universe is seen as a fractal, a hologram, a ganying (resonance) phenomenon, so everything that relates to the universe has its human counterpart. So, I would be hard pressed to tell you where it is NOT used in empirical taoist endeavors... either directly or indirectly. It is used in TCM, form-compass feng shui, martial arts, taoist painting, music, poetry, architecture, timekeeping, divination, invention, and of course internal alchemy and taoist magic. I am familiar with some of the applications but not all of them of course... like I said, it's inexhaustible.

What would you like explained? The luoshu is inexhaustible, you can't ask a moderator (even one who has studied the luoshu for Xuan Kong feng shui applications ) to explain the whole universe with its past-present-future, its being and nonbeing, its manifestations and its unmanifest, its emptiness and fullness, its opening and closing, in a TTB post. The magic square derived from the Luoshu is the key to the pattern of movement of qi in the universe. The numbers are not merely figures -- they are the actual dynamics of qi in space-time. It is hard for a Westerner to think of a number as a reality rather than an abstraction, we are taught to count the number of "something," something other than the number itself... but here we're dealing with pure numbers, not of "something" but of themselves as forces that shape Houtian, the world of manifestations. Likewise, the numbers of Hetu are forces that shape Xiantian, the unmanifest world -- tao-in-stillness. Thus tao becomes closer to the human mind's home and transpires as the co-creation of certain interactions between these forces -- that of perfect balance, in the case of Xiantian, and that of cyclical motion in the case of Houtian. So these numbers, so mundane in our everyday understanding, combine to form tao itself, or rather, are tao's inherent property and main Virtue. The reference source is Ta Chuan; I'm not aware of anything better, or even a useful substitute. Trigrams of the bagua are used to express some knowledge about these numbers' properties. To understand them, you consider the lines that form them and their interrelation. E.g., if you have one yang line between two yin lines, your trigram is "yang within yin." A name that will be used to designate it for easy recognition -- that of a natural phenomenon that also manifests as "yang within yin" -- is merely a clue to the nature of the trigram's (and its number's) energies, not the "substance" itself. So "mountain" is not mountain and "lake" is not lake, though they both (and the rest of them) partake of the energies that shaped them thus. Anyway... don't let me get carried away on one of my pet mounts, I've stuff to do.

Do feel better soon!

Come again?..

Um... nope. It comes from the Latin "religare," which means "to reconnect what has been disconnected." The origin of the idea that humanity has been "disconnected" and needs to "reconnect" to the divine is very ancient. According to Mircea Eliade, the most influential authority on indigenous/shamanic cultures and their beliefs, all mythologies of all peoples on Earth contain in some shape or form a story of humans and gods communicating freely and directly at one time. They often mention, pretty much everywhere, Siberia to Africa to the South Pacific Islands, a luminous celestial body that was bridged to the earth so gods came down and humans went up -- which one day took off and disappeared, with dire effects for the humanity. Practices of "reconnection" were developed everywhere in an attempt to rebuild that bridge, reestablish that connection -- "religare." Institutionalized "religion" capitalized on this genuine and valid drive by cunningly and skillfully slipping in its own fabricated messages and falsified duties and obligations to the usurpers of divinity who are anything but. So "taking another look" is also a good idea... and if you are looking to connect to the divine rather than to an "established" church, you are actually looking in the right place. However, if you are connected to the "there's nothing divine" dogma of "modern science" instead, keep in mind that it is merely another false institutionalized religion, with duties and obligations amounting to believing and acting in full submission to whoever happens to be in power!

The force that keeps everyone asleep and hypnotized is repression. Its agents and devices are many and its palace is the neocortex. Its servants are dispensed all over the body and all through the mind, keeping all your memories, those of the actual events you lived through in this life since before birth, in solitary confinement cells that don't allow them to communicate with other inmates OR the "current you" who knows nothing about their existence. Kundalini is one such inmate, the big gal, but by far not the only one. Awakening kundalini amounts to breaking down the door of her cell and out she rushes, and because she is a big gal, she smashes doors of many, many (though never all and never all at once) other cells on her way out, so many other inmates rush out, and many cells she can't break through at once she will be banging against violently till the doors fall or she drops dead, or both. That's what you perceive that is conveniently chalked up to some abstract, no-relation-to-my-personal-developmental-history "kundalini syndrome." It ain't no syndrome. It's you. It's everything your consciousness wasn't allowed to perceive because it is a totalitarian police state, your consciousness is, that's the way it was shaped so far by "civilized" human innovations in the ways to raise the young of the species in the past few thousand years. The danger of kundalini awakening is that of a prison break, a prison riot. You can't say it's a bad thing, but you have to have lived through a prison riot within your own being to know how un-plannable, un-controllable, un-expected the developments can be in the course of a violent revolt against the police state that unbeknown to you ruled your consciousness till then. Awakened kundalini guarantees no such thing as a better resulting state of consciousness, an "enlightened" rule within your consciousness. If you manage to learn each prisoner's name, history, skills and strengths, weaknesses and desires, if you learn, one by one, what your true feelings are and where they come from and how and why... then you may eventually have them stop raging or despairing or otherwise acting out their pent-up frustrations and start communicating with each other, learning about each other, and doing something constructive together. Rebuilding the former prison into a temple, or a hut in the mountains, or a suburban home, they will know what they really want to build and where they want to live once they've been accounted for, acknowledged, accepted, and calmed down. Occasionally -- on many occasions -- they won't be able to learn to communicate with each other constructively, and will merely turn the former prison into a lunatic asylum. Then the ones exhausted in the course of the riot will go catatonic, and the stronger one or two will bully everyone else into submission, and the new "home" for your consciousness will be as lousy as the prison it was before. It all depends...

I know you weren't firing, I meant I liked your metaphor and it will come back to me when/if I am. I am neither tough nor not tough.

You are welcome -- and enjoy the viewing! I might not have to use my own advice after all -- way overcast here today, which is way unusual... but then, in San Diego ("another tough day in paradise," as the local saying goes) the weather is always as though closely supervised by deities who are using it as a golden standard to compare all weather elsewhere on earth to -- so if it's overcast today, it's meant to be...