Taomeow

Yeah, I see you synchronistically posted exactly this explanation seconds before my entry... I swear I didn't see it, I just read your mind, is all.

Who doesn't?.. That's a keeper! How many times I ran into this problem at forums -- I'm shooting my rounds peacefully, launching my missiles, detonating my nuclear devices, business as usual... everything in a private-personal/keep-out-for-your-own-safety training ground, just working on my demolition skills with no live targets in mind... and hey presto, along comes a drive-by shootee and gets in the line of fire and claims I hit him/her directly and on purpose! Where was your wisdom when I grappled with the predicament not knowing how to say "I'm minding MY business here, not yours! Keep driving toward YOUR business, not mine! And if you choose to drive into the line of fire, in fact swerve in order to get in my range, tear your shirt and bare your chest/bosom to the hazards and get hit in this manner... well, just drop dead or something, it's not my fault!" Marblehead was just kidding though I think... I don't think he got offended, I think he just felt like test-driving the "I'm offended" vehicle across your training ground... am I right, Marble?..

Yes to all of the above. Saturate your perceptions and starve your conceptions -- that's the universal recipe for a taoist beginner, IMO. Most Westerners go the other way around about it... and, alas, not only beginners. Rule of thumb: if it's too metaphysical, if it asks you to handle your "self" a particular way rather than your work or your play, it is missing the mark. Let your body and your mind be occupied with something simultaneously -- the same thing both together -- something other than "self" and ideas "around" and "about" it -- and that's when the "self" will dissolve into your practice, your work, your play, your relationships, into nature, into nurture... into tao. By contrast, if you let your body be occupied with one thing, your mind with another, never notice they are doing different or even opposite things, ruminate on the "self this" and "self that" and "ego this" and "ego that" while your body is doing something entirely unrelated and your senses are running on idle -- and you will have entered the most popular practice out there, the practice of slicing soup.

Well, of course there's songs with words in the taoist tradition. They do not express opinions though, as a rule. They express feelings, moods, movements of the human heart, the human eye, the whole array of senses and emotions... They use striking poetic images but seldom far-fetched ones -- they are closer to immediate observations, often so precise as to be palpable... This is the tradition of taoist poetry, it paints pictures. An opinion that paints a picture is probably possible to express but that would be a top level artistic accomplishment, so I would leave that for later... and start out the traditional way.

When I was in China, I contracted a local cold and had a chance to ask a prominent TCM physician who is also a taoist in the Longmen tradition what to do about it. He said, you sweat it out, but not exercising in any way -- you take an herbal formula for that. And prescribed one. A very light cold will respond by next morning, but not all colds are very light. Keep it up till you are done. I don't know what the doctor in China used. My own home remedies include garlic tea, raspberry tea, a hot mustard foot soak, and sleeping under a heap of heavy blankets immediately afterwards. If you don't sweat it out, it might appear as though it's gone but the place it's gone to is deeper inside your system rather than out. You don't have a "common cold" anymore but you have weakened lungs instead, or kidneys, or heart. So whatever you do, try to make sure it goes "out" rather than "deeper in." Sweating is the most ready indicator of success. Good luck!

Fair enough... I'll try the simplest terms I can think of: for a musician, listening to classical Han music, based by its creators on taoist principles, can provide a feel for these things which words can't convey; many taoist concepts are impossible to grasp outside a practice, though people who are not practicing any taoist practices do talk a bundle about these concepts; absolutely everything people say about taoist principles who do not live taoist lives and do not practice taoist practices is invalid; individuality and its interplay with the oneness of tao is one such concept; so pick up a taoist practice and don't worry about theory, philosophy, or principles until you come to a place where you find you're practicing too much and not thinking enough. The signs will be, you are very healthy, very happy, very serene, at peace with yourself, have a heart full of joy, but are not taken seriously by highbrow people. If you can live with that, live with that. If you can't, read Joseph Needham and use him as a weapon to beat their high brows down with.

Nothing is easier! Get yourself a set of classical Han music CDs, available at Amazon, and make a habit of meditating to that. Musician+tao perspective is what they are. The perspective you've suggested is absolutely un-taoist though web-popular as such. You chose a famous name for yourself -- do you remember the chapter where Laozi contrasts himself, an individual, with the rest of the people? "all people are bright, I alone am dull... all people are busy, I alone am idle... all people are this and that, I alone am such and such..." How much more individualistic can you get, pitching yourself against the habitual ways of the whole community?.. Individuality thrives on taoism, but in ways uncommon, un-western... like with all tao-supported opposites, you get to be an individual only if you thoroughly internalize the universalities, and you get to be universal only if you are unique. "Qi blows at ten thousand things ten thousand different ways so each can be itself." Read Eva Wong's Tales of the Taoist Immortals for another example... unique individuals all of them, you can't confuse one with the other...

Tai Sui, the spirit/qi counterpart of the planet Jupiter, known as the Grand Duke, is the most reckoned-with celestial force in taoism. The most important thing all feng shui people who are anybody advise in terms of interacting with him is actually a negative -- do not confront/face Tai Sui, no mortal has ever emerged victorious from trying to stare him down. While it usually applies to the sitting position (this year's Tai Sui is in the Northeast), as well as avoidance of any noise and excessive activity in the part of the house where Tai Sui rests, staring at the sky while he makes his approach and gaping at him directly may be the kind of behavior he particularly resents. Remember that Jupiter's mass is greater than that of all other planets of the Solar System combined... the guy has a lot of clout, and the office of the Grand Duke (for it's an office, not one person but a succession of 64 deities take turns assuming the position, military commanders most of them) is not only exceedingly powerful but one that has a direct and immediate impact on the lives of billions of people -- Tai Sui is the one who decides war and peace on earth. Lately I've been sneaking quick, sideways, peripheral glances at His Brightness every night when the sky was clear, and I will do so when the brightness and majesty are at their fullest... but I wouldn't use binoculars or stare too obviously or intently. The ancient belief -- if you're looking a powerful person square in the face you're challenging him -- is one he reportedly never abandoned.

Well, the video doesn't discredit him in any way -- he is soft and supple, good posture, nice footwork, adequate interplay of light and heavy... notice how he flies up effortlessly like a balloon, despite his bulk? If he wants to do a baseball bat form, why not?.. I was taught to use anything handy when necessary... a real-life fight would incorporate any random objects from one's environment, absolutely, so why not practice with some of them?.. Besides, he looks like someone who would do reasonably well with any traditional form -- I'm sure baseball is not where he started.

Books... it's a tough one, I don't seem to remember any one comprehensive source, but a few good ones I recall that initially contributed to my understanding were The Web That Has No Weaver, by Ted Kaptchuk, OMD, also Taiji Songs, a lot of Xuan Kong feng shui sources (e.g. David Twicken, Joseph Yu, or even his talented student Elizabeth Moran), well I would read Ta Chuan religiously too, The Yellow Emperor's classic... but one place to go to I don't have a pointer to. Been thinking of creating it... I would start with the simple "list" from Taiji Songs -- as short and to the point as few sources are, yet sweeping a huge segment of the "typical" behavior of all Five Phases under its wing: Water descends Wood expands Fire ascends Earth rotates Metal contracts Then we have the compass associations: Water-- north, Wood -- east, Fire -- south, Earth -- either center or 15-degree slices between cardinal directions (*depending on the system you use, there's different ways to handle Earth), Metal -- west. Then we have the mystical animal associations: Water -- Black Tortoise, Wood -- Green Dragon, Fire -- Red Phoenix, Earth -- Yellow Snake, Metal -- White Tiger. And so on. This will be easily simple-to-complex-ified the taoist way if you phase in the Yin and Yang manifestations of each phase, and then start adding their Bagua interactions (the eight trigrams)... So I would say, any which taoist art-science-practice approached from the basics-classics-fundamentals IS the book you're looking for... :-)

Cool stuff, thank you, Spectrum! Here's a few more tidbits: Some authorities hold that the seraphim had their origin in the Egyptian "seref," a composite, winged creature, half lion and half eagle, which guarded graves, carried dead kings up to heaven, and transmitted prayers thither. Seref is still a popular Muslim name in some countries. And the Arabic "sharif," which gave us our sheriff, is thought of as being of the same etymology by some researchers.

Well, you can use finer wuxing distinctions to discover the main and auxiliary types of qi of a tree which is, as you rightfully pointed out, primarily Wood in all cases. E.g., Pine is Wood with Fire, oak is Wood with Metal, willow is, indeed, Wood with Water, etc.. And then you can fine-tune that too -- kelp is Yin Wood with Yin Water, birch is Yin Wood with Yin Metal, oak is Yang Wood with Yin Metal, many fruit-bearing trees are Yang Wood... and so on. No tree has Yang Metal, which is why you can't cut a piece of steel tube with a wooden knife made of any wood. Some trees have Yang Fire -- the spontaneously combustible ones with volatile oils that sunlight is enough to ignite (Moses had his interactions with a father-in-heaven through one of these yang-fire bushes). And so on. My advice to anyone who wants to get intimate with these energies would be, don't memorize lists, memorize just one list -- Wuxing properties of qi -- and then look for their manifestations in nature... it is absolutely fascinating, I promise.

Excellent! I immediately had an image in my mind's eye of having taught someone how to ride a bicycle. The student, a rather cerebral adult male, kept jamming the bicycle into the only palm tree in the otherwise empty parking lot. "I keep looking at that damn tree so as not to ride into it and still I can't avoid it," he complained. To which I replied, "whenever you focus directly on the obstacle, you are going to run smack into it." The palm tree in this case was exactly what deviated from the way -- and showed the way away from it by its very presence -- the trick of mastering anything, including the bicycle and the Way, is to use one's peripheral vision to remain aware (not oblivious!) of any and all obstacles and deviations, while simultaneously using one's central vision to watch out for where there aren't any. What do you think?

Awwww.... blush... thank you! Aren't you too one of our guardian spirits?

Why are you misinforming a newcomer? There's hardly just "amateurs" on this forum, although of course they will constitute the majority anywhere on earth in any undertaking. Are you, furthermore, aware that telling someone not to seek advice on a webforum constitutes advice you are giving on a webforum? Why post just to make someone feel bad, as a matter of fact? If you must post a bitter pill, why not make it medicine, not poison? That's not an "amateur" skill, granted, but why don't you practice... a webforum is a great place to work on this difficult higher-level ability.

Oh brother... I feel your pain as my own.

We either didn't read the same book. Or your eyes skipped over the chapters mine didn't.

Nah, don't view it with green eyes, it's more trouble than its worth... besides, it is not a reliable marker of true intelligence... I'm told a bank account is. I read it a long time ago, so I don't remember the details, only the gist of it... but based on my own goings on in the heyday of kundalini, a cool flow could help only AFTER the fire was almost out by virtue of burning for a long time and running out of fuel. There's no such thing as balanced channels in modern humans. I wonder why the very proponents of the "we're-all-one-being" doctrines keep forgetting about it and separating flocks into "us" and "them" the moment something goes wrong with "them" but not with "us." There's no exemptions -- a polluted, violence-ridden planet is not floating in a place separate from a KAP practitioner or any other practitioner of anything sealed off from her problem-free bliss except in the domain of the neocortical as-if loops... lemme reference that since I'm mentioning them for the second time. The best idea as to why some people don't seem to suffer no matter what is actually going on with them and everybody else came to me not from a spiritual but from a scientific-with-a-heart source, Antonio Damasio the prominent cognitive neuroscientist. He describes the neurological mechanics of such as-if constructs of the mind that begin and end in a loop in the neocortex -- as opposed to the real bodymind pathways behind real internal events (feelings, emotions and thoughts) that invariably (sic) begin in the body, feed to the brain, get feedback from the brain back to the body and provide a real rather than an as-if loop of experience. He also describes a medical condition termed "anosognosia," literally "absence of knowledge of the disease" -- in its extreme cases, a patient who is completely paralyzed from the neck down is unable to understand that something is wrong with him, the information doesn't get processed, and since the brain gets nothing even remotely close to normal by way of feedback from the body, it creates its own picture of reality that doesn't depend on such information. In every single case, this picture is rosy. Perfect happy normal business as usual. No amount of evidence to the contrary can shatter this conviction in an anosognosiac. I think this is the most horrible disease known to man, and unlike the extreme ones, mild cases are all over the place.

That's correct. However, as a reader of fortunes by taoist methods, I have never seen a chart without a "chi deviation," nor a face, nor a spine, nor heard a voice that didn't reveal it, nor smelled perfect balance, with the exception of a few top level masters who were in this balanced state after at least over forty years of taoist practice. And they, in every case, had a story of a huge upheaval to tell about the beginning of their path. I wouldn't want anyone comparing views in this thread to feel that if something is going on with them short of a smooth sailing it's a sign of some "deviation" in them not shared by the general population. No, my friends, no and no. You are not inferior to the problem-free "positive experiencers." You're just blessed or cursed (however you look at it) with your "stuff" being closer to the surface, your defensive walls thinner, your sensitivity and responsiveness higher. Is all. Other than that, we're all in the same modern boat which hasn't been sailing smoothly for quite a while now... have you noticed?..

I can't help commending a filial son. But neither can I help noticing that your mother had a smooth sailing where her guru himself didn't. Muktananda's "Play of Consciousness" describes a horrendous kundalini upheaval he himself lived through.

As to whether caution is an appropriate reaction... I love to quote Castaneda (debunkers please relax, it's not about whether he was for real, it's about good writing) on the issue of the right attitude for approaching a serious practice (quoting from memory, and "man" is interchangeable with "woman" here, obviously): "A man goes to knowledge as a man goes to war: with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge and going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and some won't live to regret it." As for the Wuxing paths to take -- well, yes, there are Wood, Metal and Earth paths too, Metal being interchangeable with Air/Wind in some traditions. I know quite a bit about the Wood path, e.g. the official name for the shamans I worked with in Peru is vegetalista curanderos, "vegetalista" being of the same root as "vegetable," "curandero" of course of the same root as "cure," i.e. Wood phase healers or masters of Wood medicine. Knowing my own layout of Wuxing phases, I would never choose a Metal, Earth or Fire path (only in the light of my Wuxing reading does it become clear why my accidental kundalini initiation was, first of all, possible -- this kind of awakening, with minimal provocation, can only happen to someone who has plenty of Wood, plenty of Fire, and not enough Water in her chart -- so in terms of how cautions one should be with the practice, my take would be, as usual, it's individual -- -- someone with lots of Water and no Fire might not ignite kundalini in the longest time with the most diligent practice, while for someone with my kind of chart a spark might suffice... My 4P chart illustrates, with uncanny precision, why in my case it was so incredibly hot, so blindingly fiery, and so easy to start but so difficult to stop... It also illustrates why someone like me should never choose a Fire path... also, why at the same time she would be particularly attracted to a Fire path and forced to consciously go against the moth attraction... and so on. But my ears are burning, no pun intended... that book about individual choices of practices etc. based on one's personal Wuxing dynamics that I started... and stopped... sheesh, I've got to get back on track...) So -- I'm not a believer in the one practice fits all roll call. Cultivation is about solving your existing problems, not creating new ones. An unbalanced Wuxing layout is a common and serious problem. The best cultivation starts out addressing that. So you are right, balancing all five phases is what you're aiming at -- but you can only do it by working so as to enhance the ones that are deficient and subdue the ones that are excessive. So you choose which phases you increase, and choose wisely because the dominant ones ("ego" to a believer in such a thing as an ego) will simply keep wanting more of the same, more of what is already excessive... to name just one false path an imbalance of the five can start one on. You asked me about Lingbao Bifa earlier -- well, that includes some great cultivation moves aimed at precisely this, balancing the five phases. You want to start there, and do bigger alchemy in a vessel that won't crack, catch on fire, get overturned by Wind, or grow moldy like damp wood... and so on. Once you have such a sturdy vessel, you use them all!

Well, it WAS funny. I apologize in my turn for focusing on the fly in the ointment of your joke... I was going to delete my entry but was too late.

Depends on whether I understood you correctly. Do you mean that when people who share their own personal experiences instead of commenting on videos they watched (like me, Eternal Student, and Ralis, e.g.) and you don't like what you hear, this constitutes "unnecessary fear mongering going on here?" Or are you referring to something else entirely that I may have missed?

But how do you internalize the dynamics of every move if it is not explained and illustrated in its martial application? A few are obvious, but most are not... you don't really know what you're doing unless you're doing it in a martial context, and if you don't know what you are doing with a move, the flow of qi will be sitting this one out. In my class, martial applications of each and every move are revealed... even if some are skipped over for a while, the moment you run into problems with them (or rather, learn and practice enough to start getting more aware of the problems that you didn't have the skill and the feel to notice before) -- application to the rescue! I discovered that unless it is done this way, many moves are impossible to "get." E.g., 擊地捶 ("punching to the ground", the 33rd move in Chen Laojia) -- the teacher sometimes explained it as "planting a tree" -- I always had difficulty with this image in this position and felt awkward, something kinesthetically counterintuitive about it... till one day a classmate asked the teacher, what's the martial use of this one, are we attacking the opponent's toe punching it with the fist? So then the teacher showed what it's really used for... yikes, its sheer brutality is comparable only to that of The Golden Rooster (easily the most devastating move I know... but initially it was taught as a mere balance exercise and the teacher would even wave his raised palm in the air and say, jokingly, "hello!.." Yet my balance in this position was far from crisp until I knew what it is you're using it for.) So -- it is my empirical observation that taiji taught non-martially can be somewhat better than sloppy but never crisp and precise the way it evolves to be when taught martially... Of course then you can use it for any purpose and with any intent, its possibilities are infinite... but the learning stage undertaken without practical bodily references to its martial source is akin to learning how to ride a bicycle without the bicycle.

I have to agree. Forces that shaped galaxies, built and destroyed worlds of billions of sentient inhabitants while revealing themselves to none, the cosmic serpent whose "goals," if one could apply this human concept to her "psychology," may take a few more billion years for a few of them to comprehend, are routinely discussed in the same terms one would use when instructing someone about taking a bubble bath -- just relax... just surrender... and enjoy! The hubris of the human animal is unmatched in the whole of the universe... It's not just "mental" vs "physical" aspects -- it's the totality of feeling-thinking-functioning-integrating that is the tricky part... Time can get very tricky in particular, your body can be thrown far back in time while your mind is desperately hanging on to the "now" -- the pull of memory, the push of repression, the revolt of the body cells that know what they're after against the brain cells that scream "don't you dare..." ...the lower brain, the part that is torn between its task to instruct your body how to breathe the "now" air and the unresolved breathless life-and-death struggle of its embedded memory... and you need to harmonize everything that is going on, arrive at a conscious picture of everything, because the moment you're distracted by a part of you -- physical or emotional or ideological -- other parts go haywire... It's about harmony made out of chaos, and a bubble bath doesn't quite cut it.